Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race, and Public Policy Reader (Critical Black Studies)

SEEKING HIGHER GROUND

THE CRITICAL BLACK STUDIES SERIES Institute for Research in African-American Studies Columbia University Edited by Manning Marable

The Critical Black Studies Series features readers and anthologies examining challenging topics within the contemporary black experience—in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa, as well as across the African Diaspora. All readers include scholarly articles originally published in the acclaimed quarterly interdisciplinary journal Souls, published by the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. Under the general editorial supervision of Manning Marable, the readers in the series are designed both for college and university course adoption, as well as for general readers and researchers. The Critical Black Studies Series seeks to provoke intellectual debate and exchange over the most critical issues confronting the political, socioeconomic, and cultural reality of black life in the United States and beyond. Titles in this series published by Palgrave Macmillan: Racializing Justice, Disenfranchising Lives: The Racism, Criminal Justice, and Law Reader Edited by Manning Marable, Ian Steinberg, and Keesha Middlemass Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race, and Public Policy Reader Edited by Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke Transnational Blackness: African Americans Navigating the Global Color Line Edited by Manning Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones The Islam and Black America Reader Edited by Manning Marable and Hisham Aidi The New Black History: The African-American Experience since 1945 Reader Edited by Manning Marable and Peniel Joseph Beyond Race: New Social Movements in the African Diaspora Edited by Leith Mullings The Black Women, Gender, and Sexuality Reader Edited by Manning Marable Black Intellectuals: The Race, Ideology, and Power Reader Edited by Manning Marable

SEEKING HIGHER GROUND THE HURRICANE KATRINA CRISIS, RACE, AND PUBLIC POLICY READER

Edited by Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke

SEEKING HIGHER GROUND

Copyright © Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-8396-1 (hardcover) ISBN-10: 1-4039-8396-8 (hardcover) ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-7779-3 (paperback) ISBN-10: 1-4039-7779-8 (paperback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. This volume includes articles which originally appeared in Souls, published by the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University. Design by Scribe, Inc. First edition: January 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

CONTENTS List of Illustrations

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Introduction: Seeking Higher Ground: Race, Public Policy and the Hurricane Katrina Crisis Manning Marable

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I.

Politics and Place

1

The New Orleans Mayoral Election: The Voting Rights Act and the Politics of Return and Rebuild Ronald Walters

2

3

4

5

6

3

The New Orleans That Race Built: Racism, Disaster, and Urban Spatial Relationships Darwin Bond Graham

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Race-ing the Post-Katrina Political Landscape: An Analysis of the 2006 New Orleans Election Kristen Clarke

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Property and Security, Political Chameleons, and Dysfunctional Regime: A New Orleans Story D. Osei Robertson

39

Hurricane Katrina as an Elaboration on an Ongoing Theme: Racialized Spaces in Louisiana K. Animashaun Ducre

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An Interview with Judge Ivan L. R. Lemelle Suzette M. Malveaux

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II. Culture, Tradition, and Identity 7

8

New Orleans’s African American Musical Traditions: The Spirit and Soul of a City Michael White Hero, Eulogist, Trickster, and Critic: Ritual and Crisis in Post-Katrina Mardi Gras Chelsey Louise Kivland

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107

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9

CONTENTS

(Re)Imagining Ethnicity in the City of New Orleans: Katrina’s Geographical Allegory Stephanie Houston Grey

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10 The Rebuilding of a Tourist Industry: Immigrant Labor Exploitation in the Post-Katrina Reconstruction of New Orleans 141 Loren Redwood III. Race and Repression 11 “Do You Know What It Means . . . ?”: Mapping Emotion in the Aftermath of Katrina Melissa Harris-Lacewell 12 Witness: The Racialized Gender Implications of Katrina Kathleen A. Bergin

153 173

13 The Impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Race and Class Divide in America Thomas J. Durant Jr. and Dawood Sultan

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14 Katrina’s Southern “Exposure”: The Kanye Race Debate and the Repercussions of Discussion Erica M. Czaja

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15 Oral History, Folklore, and Katrina Alan H. Stein and Gene B. Preuss

225

IV. Reimagining the Past and Reconstructing the Future 16 What Happens When the Footprints Shrink: New Orleans and the End of Eminence Julianne Malveaux

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17 “The City I Used to . . . Visit”: Tourist New Orleans and the Racialized Response to Hurricane Katrina Lynell Thomas

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18 The Social Construction of Disaster: New Orleans as the Paradigmatic American City Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires

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19 Are They Katrina’s Kids or Ours? The Experience of Displaced New Orleans Students in Their New Schools and Communities Kevin Michael Foster

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20 Envisioning “Complete Recovery” as an Alternative to “Unmitigated Disaster” Mindy Thompson Fullilove, et al.

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About the Authors

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Index

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Table 11.1

Figure 11.1

Table 11.2

Table 11.3

Table 14.1

Table 14.2

Mean scores on Kennedy Assassination Survey Symptom Checklist

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Percent who report feeling negative emotions “very often” in the weeks immediately following Hurricane Katrina

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Model of emotional distress among black and white Americans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

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Percent of white and black respondents who agree with indicators in model

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Audience size and reader income distribution of the three largest national newspapers

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Katrina discussion content

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I n t r o d u c t i o n

SEEKING HIGHER GROUND: RACE, PUBLIC POLICY AND THE HURRICANE KATRINA CRISIS MANNING MARABLE

UNQUESTIONABLY, THE SEPTEMBER 2005 HURRICANE KATRINA was the largest natural disaster in U.S. history. Yet, contrary to the assertions of President George W. Bush that no one could have “anticipated the breach of [New Orleans’s] levees” and the massive flooding and destruction of one of America’s historic cities in the wake of a major hurricane, the catastrophe we have witnessed was widely predicted for decades.1 A 2002 special report of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, for example, warned, “It’s only a matter of time before South Louisiana takes a direct hit from a major hurricane. . . .Levees, our best protection from flooding, may turn against us.” The Times-Picayune predicted that such a disaster might “decimate the region” from flooding and that in New Orleans, “100,000 will be left to face the fury.”2 That same year, in a New York Times editorial, writer Adam Cohen predicted coldly, “If the Big One hits, New Orleans could disappear.” A direct major hurricane strike, Cohen estimated, would certainly force Lake Pontchartrain’s waters “over levees and into the city. . .there could be 100,000 deaths.” Thousands “could be stranded on roofs, surrounded by a witches’ brew of contaminated water.”3 A natural disaster for New Orleans was statistically inevitable. But what made the New Orleans tragedy an “unnatural disaster” was the Federal government’s gross incompetence and indifference in preparing the necessary measures to preserve the lives and property of hundreds of thousands of its citizens. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), established in 1979, has been plagued for years with financial mismanagement, administrative incompetence, and cronyism. The litany of FEMA’s bureaucratic blunders has been amply documented: its insistence that vital supplies of food, water, and medical aid were impossible to

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deliver to thousands of people stranded at New Orleans’s downtown Morial Convention Center, though entertainers and reporters easily reached the site; its inability to rescue thousands of residents marooned on the roofs and in flooded houses for days; the failure to seek deployment of active duty troops in large numbers until three days after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast region. But the incompetence goes deeper than that. FEMA Director Michael Brown actually instructed fire departments in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama not to send emergency vehicles or personnel into devastated areas unless local or state officials communicated specific requests for them—at a time when most towns and cities lacked working telephones, fax machines, and internet access. Florida’s proposal to send 500 airboats to assist rescue efforts was blocked by FEMA. Thousands of urgently needed generators, communications equipment, and trailers and freight cars of food went undelivered for weeks. Meanwhile, hundreds of dead bodies floated in New Orleans’s streets and rotted in desolated houses. Millions of desperate Americans who attempted to phone FEMA’s 800 telephone number for assistance heard recorded messages that all lines were busy or were disconnected.4 Even before Katrina struck, it was obvious that the overwhelming majority of New Orleans residents who would be trapped inside the city to face the deluge would be poor and working-class African Americans, who comprised nearly 70 percent of the city’s population. As the levees collapsed and the city’s Ninth Ward flooded, tens of thousands of evacuees were herded into the Superdome and Convention Center, where they were forced to endure days without toilets and running water, food, electricity, and medical help. Hundreds of black evacuees seeking escape on a bridge across the Mississippi River were confronted and forcibly pushed back into the city. One paramedic witnessing the incident stated, “I believe it was racism. It was callousness, it was cruelty.”5 As the media began to document this unprecedented tragedy, the vast majority of New Orleans’s victims were “the faces at the bottom of America’s well—the poor, black and disabled,” as reporters Monica Haynes and Erv Dyer of the Pittsburgh PostGazette observed. “The indelible television images of mostly black people living in subhuman conditions for nearly a week have prompted some to ask whether race played a role in how quickly or how not-so-quickly federal and state agencies responded in [Katrina’s] aftermath.”6 However, much of the media coverage cruelly manipulated racist stereotypes in its coverage. In one well-publicized example, the Associated Press released two photographs of New Orleans residents, wading through chest-deep water, carrying food obtained from a grocery store. The whites were described as carrying “bread and soda from a local grocery store” that they found; the black man pictured was characterized as having “loot[ed] a grocery store.”7 A London Financial Times reporter, on September 5, 2005, declared New Orleans had become “a city of rape” and “a war zone,” with thousands subjected to “looting” and “arson.”8 Administrators in Homeland Security and FEMA justified their lack of emergency aid by claiming that they had not anticipated that “people would loot gun stores. . .and shoot at police, rescue officials and helicopters.” The flood of racialized images of a terrorized, crimeengulfed city prompted hundreds of white ambulance drivers and emergency personnel to refuse to enter the New Orleans disaster zone. Television reports locally and

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nationally quickly proliferated false exposés about “babies in the Convention Center who got their throats cut” and “armed hordes” highjacking ambulances and trucks. Baton Rouge’s mayor Kip Holden imposed a strict curfew on its facility that held evacuees, warning of possible violence by “New Orleans thugs.”9 That none of these sensationalized stories were true hardly mattered: as Matt Welch of Reason magazine noted, the “deadly bigotry” of the media probably helped to “kill Katrina victims.”10 The terrible destruction of thousands of homes and businesses, and relocation of over one million New Orleans and Gulf area residents, was perceived as a golden opportunity by corporate and conservative political elites who had long desired to “remake” the historic city. Even before the corpses of black victims had been cleared from New Orleans’s flooded streets, corporations closely associated with George W. Bush’s administration secured noncompetitive, multibillion dollar reconstruction contracts. Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, for example, was awarded the contract to reconstruct Louisiana and Mississippi naval bases. Bechtel was authorized to provide short-term housing for several hundred thousand displaced evacuees. Shaw, the Louisiana engineering corporation, received lucrative contracts for rebuilding throughout the area. Bush waived provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act, allowing corporations to hire workers below the minimum wage. After Congress authorized over $100 billion for the region’s reconstruction, Halliburton’s stock price surged on Wall Street.11 Local corporate subcontractors and developers who directly profited from federal subsidies set into motion plans for what local African Americans feared could quickly become a gentrification removal of thousands of black households from devastated urban neighborhoods. Behind the plans to “rebuild” New Orleans may be racially inspired objectives by Republicans to reduce the size of the city’s all-black voting precincts. About 60 percent of New Orleans’s electorate is African American, which normally turns out at 50 percent in local elections. All-white affluent neighborhoods have turnout rates exceeding 70 percent. In the 1994 mayoral race, only 6 percent of the city’s white voters supported successful black candidate Marc Morial.12 African American political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson speculated that “the loss of thousands of black votes” could easily “crack the thirty years of black, and Democratic dominance of City Hall in New Orleans.” The seat of black Democrat William Jefferson, who represents the city in Congress, could be in jeopardy. Even more seriously, Hutchinson observed, the massive African American vote in New Orleans in 2000 and 2004 “enabled Democrats to bag many top state and local offices, but just narrowly. A shift of a few thousand votes could tip those offices back to Republicans.”13 Nationally, most African American leaders, public officials, and intellectuals were overwhelmed and outraged by the flood of racist stereotypes in the media, as well as their government’s appalling inaction in failing to rescue thousands of black and poor people. They observed that the most devastated sections of the city were nearly all black and mostly poor. Local blacks had been largely ignored in preparations for evacuating the city.14 Beverly Wright, the director of Xavier University’s Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, expressed the general sentiment of most African Americans by declaring, “I am very angry, and I really, really believe that [the crisis] is driven by race. . . .When you look at who is left behind, it is very disturbing to

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me.”15 Wright’s viewpoint was echoed by many black intellectuals. For example, Harvard professor Lani Guinier observed that in American society “poor black people are the throw-away people. And we pathologize them in order to justify our disregard.”16 Some reporters assigned to the Katrina crisis soon began to reflect these mounting criticisms. Detroit Free Press columnist Desiree Cooper drew parallels between the economic devastation of New Orleans and that of Detroit, noting, “The poverty rate in both cities rivals that of Third World nations. So as I watched the hurricane coverage with racism and poverty, creating the perfect storm, I couldn’t help but think: If Detroit were underwater, no one would bother to rescue us either.”17 By mid September, 2005, 60 percent of African Americans surveyed in a national poll believed that “the federal government’s delay in helping the victims in New Orleans was because the victims were black.” By contrast, only 12 percent of white Americans agreed.18 In response, the Bush Administration unleashed its black apologists to deny any racial intent of its policies and actions. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted, “Nobody, especially the President, would have left people unattended.”19 Black conservative ideologue John McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, ridiculed the accusations of racism as “nasty, circular, [and] unprovable. . . .It’s not a matter of somebody in Washington deciding we don’t need to rush [to New Orleans] because they’re all poor jungle bunnies anyway.”20 African Americans were stunned and perplexed by white America’s general apathy and denial about the racial implications of the Katrina catastrophe. On a nationally televised fundraiser for the hurricane’s victims, rap artist Kanye West sparked controversy by denouncing “the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well off as slow as possible.”21 Blacks were especially infuriated with the descriptions of poor black evacuees as “refugees” by officials and the media. Black Congresswoman Diane Watson protested vigorously, “‘Refugee’ calls up to mind people that come here from different lands and have to be taken care of. . . .These are American citizens.”22 But the racial stigmatization of New Orleans’s outcasts forced many African Americans to ponder whether their government and white institutions had become incapable of expressing true compassion for the suffering of their people. Prominent Princeton professor Cornel West, at a Columbia University forum sponsored by the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, pondered whether “black suffering is required for the preservation of white America.”23 West’s provocative query ought to be explored seriously. The U.S. government and America’s entire political economy were constructed on a racial foundation. Blacks were excluded by race from civic participation and voting for several hundred years; they were segregated into residential ghettoes, denied credit and capital by banks, and relegated to the worst jobs for generations. Over time, popular cultural and social attitudes about black subordination and white superiority were aggressively reinforced by the weight of discriminatory law and public policy. Psychologically, is the specter of black suffering and death in some manner reaffirming the traditional racial hierarchy, the practices of black exclusion and marginalization? Even before Katrina’s racial debate had receded from the media, the question of racial insensitivity was posed again by former Reagan Education Secretary William Bennett’s remarks in a national radio broadcast. In early October 2005, Bennett announced to his radio audience: “I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to

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reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose—you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” Perhaps covering his racial gaffe, Bennett immediately added, “That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.” New York Times columnist Bob Herbert interpreted Bennett’s remarks as the central aspect of the Republican Party’s “bigotry, racially divisive tactics and outright antiblack policies. That someone who’s been a stalwart of that outfit might muse publicly about the potential benefits of exterminating blacks is not surprising to me at all. . .Bill Bennett’s twisted fantasies are a malignant outgrowth of our polarized past.”24 Bennett’s repugnant statements, combined with most white Americans’ blind refusal to recognize a racial tragedy in New Orleans, illustrate how deeply rooted racial injustice remains in America. Has the public spectacle of black suffering and anguish evolved into what might be defined as a “civic ritual,” reconfirming the racial hierarchy with blackness permanently relegated to a subordinate status? During the summer of 2005, the U.S. Senate seemed to confirm Cornel West’s hypothesis as it was forced to confront the civic ritual of lynching. Between 1882 and 1927, over 3,500 blacks were lynched in the United States, about 95 percent in the South. An unknown number of additional African Americans were killed, especially in rural and remote areas where we have few means to reconstruct these crimes. In Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930, a massive white mob stormed the jail in the local county courthouse, seizing two incarcerated African American teenagers, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, who had been accused of raping a white woman. Within less than an hour, a festive gathering of several thousand white women and men armed with baseball bats, crowbars, and guns beat and then lynched the two black boys. A photograph of the Marian lynching was reproduced in my book coauthored with Leith Mullings, Freedom. It depicts smiling young adults, a pregnant woman, teenage girls, and a middle-aged man, pointing proudly to one of the dangling corpses.25 A third young African American, a sixteen-year-old shoeshine boy named James Cameron, was also seized and beaten by the mob that night. Several men lifted Cameron up, and a noose was slipped around his neck. Just at that moment, a local white man in the crowd pushed forward and declared that young Cameron was innocent. Years later, on June 13, 2005, speaking at a U.S. Senate new conference, ninetyone-year-old James Cameron recalled: “They took the rope off my neck, those hands that had been so rough and ready to kill or had already killed, they took the rope off my neck, and they allowed me to start walking and stagger back to jail, which was just a half-block away.”26 Cameron, the only known survivor of an attempted lynching, had come to the Capitol as part of an effort to obtain a formal apology from the Senate for its historic refusal to pass federal legislation outlawing lynching. For decades, Southern senators had filibustered legislative attempts to ratify anti-lynching legislation, denouncing such bills as an unnecessary interference with states’ rights. Prompted by the emotional testimony of Cameron and the family members and descendants of lynching victims, the Senate finally issued an apology for lynching—the first time in U.S. history that Congress has acknowledged and expressed regret for historical crimes against African Americans—in a formal resolution. What

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was most significant, perhaps, was that only eighty-five of the one hundred U.S. senators had co-sponsored the resolution when it came up for a voice vote. The fifteen senators who did not initially co-sponsor the bill were Republicans. Belatedly, seven senators subsequently signed an oversized copy of the senate’s anti-lynching resolution that was to be publicly displayed. The eight senators who still refused to concede an apology were Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee); Thad Cochran (R-Mississippi), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Michael Enzi (R-Wyoming), Judd Gregg (R-New Hampshire), Trent Lott (R-Mississippi), John Sununu (R-New Hampshire), and Craig Thomas (R-Wyoming).27 Why the steadfast refusal to acknowledge the forensic evidence and the obvious human pain and suffering inflicted not only on the victims of racist violence but upon their descendants? Because, in a racist society—by this I mean a society deeply stratified with “whiteness” defined at the top and “blackness” occupying the bottom rungs—the obliteration of the black past is absolutely essential to the preservation of white hegemony, or domination. Since “race” itself is a fraudulent concept, devoid of scientific reality, “racism” can only be rationalized and justified through the suppression of black accounts or evidence that challenges society’s understanding about itself and its own past. Racism is perpetuated and reinforced by the “historical logic of whiteness” that repeatedly presents whites as the primary (and frequently sole) actors in the important decisions that have influenced the course of human events. This kind of history deliberately excludes blacks and other racialized groups from having the capacity to become actors in shaping major social outcomes. In this process of falsification, two elements are crucial: the suppression of evidence of black resistance and the obscuring of any records of white crimes and exploitation committed against blacks as an oppressed group. In this manner, white Americans can more easily absolve themselves of the historical responsibility for the actions of their great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents—and of themselves. Thus the destructive consequences of modern structural racism that can be easily measured by social scientists within contemporary U.S. society today, as well as the human suffering we have witnessed in New Orleans—can be said to have absolutely nothing to do with “racism.” Denial of responsibility for racism permits the racial chasm in America to grow wider with each passing year. When the “unnatural disaster” of the New Orleans tragedy of race and class is examined in the context of American structural racism, the denial by many whites of the reality of black suffering becomes clear. It parallels the denial of the Turkish government of the massive genocide of the Armenian population committed by the former Ottoman empire in 1915–1916. It mirrors the repulsive anti-Semitism of those who to this day deny the horrific reality of the Holocaust during World War Two. Until the denial of suffering ceases, there is no possibility of constructing meaningful, corrective measures for addressing the racial chasm that continues to fracture the foundations of democratic life and a truly civil society in America. NOTES 1. Ted Steinberg, “A Natural Disaster, and a Human Tragedy,” Chronicle of Higher Education 52, no. 5 (September 23, 2005), 811–12.

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2. “Washing Away,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 23–27, 2002. 3. Adam Cohen, “If the Big One Hits, New Orleans Could Disappear,” The New York Times, August 11, 2002. Also see Jon Nordheimer, “Nothing’s Easy for New Orleans Flood Control,” idem., April 30, 2002. 4. Editorial, “Truly Clueless at FEMA,” Boston Herald, September 8, 2005; Editorial, “Political Appointments, Loss of Focus, Crippled Disaster Relief Agency,” USA Today, September 8, 2005; Tina Susman, “FEMA: Effort Mired in Bureaucratic Hash,” Newsday, September 11, 2005; Jonathan S. Landay, Alison Young, and Shannon McCaffrey, “Was FEMA’s Brown the Fall Guy?” Seattle Times, September 14, 2005; Angie C. Marek, Edward T. Pound, Danielle Knight, Julian E. Barnes, Judd Slivka and Kevin Whitelaw, “A Crisis Agency in Crisis,” U.S. News and World Report, September 19, 2005; Editorial, “FEMA: Just a Money Pit?” Hartford Courant, September 23, 2005. 5. Andrew Buncombe, “‘Racist’ Police Blocked Bridge and Forced Evacuees Back at Gunpoint,” Independent [London], September 11, 2005. 6. Monica Haynes and Erv Dyer, “Black Faces Are Indelible Image of Katrina,” Independent, September 4, 2005. 7. Aaron Kinney, “‘Looting’ or ‘Finding’?” Salon, Septermber 1, 2005, http://dir.salon .com/story/news/feature/2005/09/01/photo_controversy/index.html. 8. Guy Dinmore, “City of Rape, Rumour and Recrimination,” Financial Times [London], September 5, 2005. 9. David Caruso, “Disaster Official at NY Symposium: Planners Didn’t Anticipate Gun Problem after Katrina,” Newsday, September 12, 2005. 10. Matt Welch, “The Deadly BigoTry of Low Expectations? Did the Rumor Mill Help Kill Katrina Victims?” Reason Online, http://www.reason.com/links/links090605.shtml. 11. Katherine Griffiths, “Firms Linked with Bush Get Katrina Clean-Up Work,” The Independent [London], September 17, 2005; Scott Van Voorhis, “Katrina Boon to Builders,” Boston Herald, September 6, 2005. 12. Coleman Warner, “Primary Turnout Makes Black Vote Crucial in Runoff,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, February 7, 1994. 13. Earl Ofari Hutchinson, “Katrina Wallops Black Voters,” available from hutchinson [email protected]. 14. Jonathan Curiel, “Disaster Aid Raises Race Issue; Critics Say Poor Blacks Not Considered in Planning for Emergencies, Evacuations,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 3, 2005. 15. Alex Tzon, “Katrina’s Aftermath: Images of the Victims Spark a Racial Debate; Some Say Authorities’ Response Time Is Affected by the Victims’ Skin Color,” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 2005. 16. Lynne Duke and Teresa Wiltz, “A Nation’s Castaways: Katrina Blew In, and Tossed Up Reminders of a Tattered Racial Legacy,” Washington Post, September 4, 2005. 17. Desiree Cooper, “Outrage, Caring Mix in Katrina Response,” Detroit Free Press, September 15, 2005. 18. CNN, USA Today, and the Gallup poll released September 13, 2005, cited in Ibid. Other opinion polls confirmed that most black Americans believed that racism was behind the federal government’s inaction to aid Katrina’s victims. A Pew Institute poll, for example, indicated that 66 percent of blacks surveyed “felt the government would have reacted faster if the stranded victims had been mainly white than black.” See Alex Massie, “Racial Tensions Simmer as Blacks Bear Brunt of Slow Official Response,” http://www.Scotsman.com/?id=1920892005. 19. Elisabeth Bumiller, “Gulf Coast Isn’t the Only Thing Left in Tatters; Bush’s Status with Blacks Takes a Hit,” The New York Times, September 12, 2005.

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20. Duke, “A Nation’s Castaways.” 21. Kanye West, quoted on The O’Reilly Factor, Fox News Network, September 8, 2005. 22. Robert E. Pierre and Paul Farhi, “‘Refugee’: A Word of Trouble,” Washington Post, September 7, 2005. 23. Cornel West, “When Affirmative Action Was White” (remarks, Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University, New York City, October 1, 2005). 24. Bob Herbert, “Impossible, Ridiculous, Repugnant,” The New York Times, October 6, 2005. 25. See Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle (London: Phaidon, 2002), 132. 26. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Senate Issues Apology Over Failure on Anti-Lynching Law,” The New York Times, June 14, 2005. 27. “Eight U.S. Senators Decline to Cosponsor Resolution Apologizing for Failure to Enact Anti-Lynching Legislation,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education Weekly Bulletin, June 30, 2005; Avis Thomas-Lester, “Repairing Senate’s Record on Lynching,” Washington Post, June 11, 2005.

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C h a p t e r

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THE NEW ORLEANS MAYORAL ELECTION: THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT AND THE POLITICS OF RETURN AND REBUILD RONALD WALTERS

INTRODUCTION The first regular post-Katrina election for the city of New Orleans, originally set for February 2, 2006, was washed out following the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina. An important post-Katrina case study is to analyze the extent to which the hurricanes, which affected the physical condition of so many African Americans, also impacted their fundamental citizenship rights. In particular, it is important to assess whether those rights, especially the right to vote, would be protected given the scope of general issues that encompass the rehabilitation process. Given the state of disorganization, despair, and urgency for some of the displaced New Orleans residents that I encountered in visits to the region, voting in the election was a lower priority relative to other rebuilding issues such as finding housing, obtaining economic subsistence, finding and burying relatives, and other critical issues. Nevertheless, what was at stake in the election was the potential displacement of black political power, not only in the city of New Orleans, but as it affected the status of black presence in the state legislature and in the Congress of the United States as well. Also at stake in the election was a test of democratic theory—that is to say, whether the selection of the leadership for the city by the electorate would represent

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a choice for a particular set of desired public policy. Theorist Robert Dahl’s arguments have particular relevance to the situation in New Orleans; he has suggested that “[a] good deal of Democratic theory leads us to expect more from national elections than they can possibly provide. . .[i.e., that they] reveal the ‘will’ of the majority on a set of issues.”1 Rather, he argues, most often the normal result of voting by majorities is that they express the underlying consensus on policy but that the particulars of policy are most often the work of minorities.2 Thus, what “underlying consensus” was expressed in this case? In post-Katrina New Orleans, the concern was not merely the process by which the votes would be cast, but the presumption among those who advocated for the right to vote that participating in the election would have an empowering effect, as I described in Freedom Is Not Enough.3 In that sense, as the mayoral election addressed the monumental crisis caused by Katrina, the election would be the instrument through which the citizens of New Orleans could make manifest their views about their right to return and rebuild. The election carried with it, then, decisions about who would lead and what would be the priorities in the agenda of their leadership. Pre-Katrina census data indicate that the city of New Orleans had 462,269 residents prior to the storm. The stakes of this election were dependent upon the nearly impossible task of mobilizing all voters in a city where 70 percent of the population was black and over 200,000 residents remained displaced. The result was that the large number of persons who remain displaced, particularly those in various parts of Louisiana and among forty-four other states, left the city with well under 50 percent of its black population to participate in the election. Thus, issues concerning the status of the black vote immediately drew the specter of voting rights activists given the prohibition in the Voting Rights Act (VRA) that the black vote should not be diluted. Their attention was focused on the extent to which the Louisiana State Legislature and the city would, in pursuing the election, help preserve the ability of blacks to vote, and thus ensure that the voting system would provide fair access to the ballot. By extension, the problem of addressing barriers to vote in New Orleans was set in the context of the actions and attitude of the Bush administration with respect to the manner in which the Justice Department implemented provisions of the Voting Rights Act that were in the process of being reauthorized. This analysis will proceed from the perspective of the black community’s understanding of the issues surrounding these elections and the dilemmas involved.

ELECTORAL DISENFRANCHISEMENT In the uncertainty that characterized whether the post-Katrina municipal election could be conducted in New Orleans in light of extensive hurricane damage, thenGovernor Kathleen Blanco announced that the election date would be moved from February to April 22. Soon thereafter, the state legislature met in an emergency session in February to consider the parameters under which the election could be conducted, given the extraordinary circumstances that existed in New Orleans. It passed Act 40, which attempted to establish a new set of procedures for voting in the context of the crisis, but that expanded access only slightly.4 The leading local election

THE NEW ORLEANS MAYORAL ELECTION

5

official in New Orleans, Katherine Butler, indicated that of the normal 427 election precincts only 300 were operable and that her usual staff of 3,000 election officials had shrunk by more than half. Moreover, the infrastructure of the city was eroded such that it made transportation, administration, and other vital functions of election administration particularly onerous.5 Meanwhile, it became clear both to local officials and outside observers that holding an election under circumstances in which the population had been so widely dispersed presented a unique challenge, and thus a debate developed over whether the election should be delayed further or held as soon as possible. Those who felt that it should be delayed reasoned that it would take some time to determine where voters had been displaced and to reorganize the election system to permit a satisfactory process. On the other hand, those who felt that it should be held sooner believed that the delay would promote conditions under which displaced residents would adjust to their local circumstances outside of the state and become registered voters and permanent residents in those areas. In any case, there was considerable angst and concern in the national civil rights community that black voters would be disenfranchised, as indicated by Bruce Gordon, President of the NAACP, who said: “We are afraid that many African-American voters will be disenfranchised due to unclear directives, misinformation, and acts of omission on the part of those officials charged with ensuring equal access to the polls.”6 Therefore, what came to be regarded as a “two-track” strategy developed. The first track focused on preparations for the election while attempting to remove the barriers in the process—this plan, established by then-Secretary of State Al Ater’s office, concerned absentee voting, first-time voting, validating voter rolls, presenting accurate information to voters, et cetera. This track was led by the NAACP, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), National Bar Association, the National Coalition of Black Civic Participation (NCBCP), the Advancement Project, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and the Louisiana Black Legislative Caucus (LBLC). Beginning with a meeting between the NAACP head, Bruce Gordon, and U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, these groups pushed to ease the rules by which displaced voters could participate in the election. Other local and national leaders such as the Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr., the Reverend Al Sharpton, Louisiana State Senator Cleo Fields, and others were concerned however, that the election itself was being held under apparent illegal circumstances.7 They pointed to the formidable barriers to participating in the election process, including changes in the voting procedures that had not been precleared by the Justice Department in accordance with the requirements of the Voting Rights Act given Louisiana’s status as one of the Act’s covered states. In this respect, an important mid March meeting was initiated by the Reverend Jackson and Senator Fields with the U.S. Assistant Attorney General and representatives of the Voting Rights Section of the Civil Rights Division to voice concerns about the lack of Justice Department preclearance and the existence of formidable barriers facing voters in the upcoming election. Preclearance had not yet occurred, in violation of the Act’s requirements, despite the fact that the Louisiana state legislature had enacted, and the Secretary of State had implemented, a set of changes to voting procedure in

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New Orleans. Some of these changes included the merger of voting precincts in the predominantly black sections of the city where the damage was greatest. The response from Justice officials to these issues was a noncommittal and cautious promise to review all the facts before making a finding. A summary analysis of the barriers that impacted the rights of displaced voters follows: Demand for Satellite Voting outside Louisiana As indicated above, the majority of the dispersed residents were relocated to several nearby states, such as Mississippi, Alabama, Texas and Arkansas. However, the State of Louisiana established only ten satellite voting sites, all located inside the state. The prevailing view among black leaders was that satellite voting sites that would capture the votes of a sizeable number of displaced citizens could be mounted in other states. The historical precedent for this demand was that for the first democratic election in Poland, election sites were set up in Chicago, Illinois, and for the December 2005 Iraqi election, out-of-country voting was also allowed to take place within the United States. With respect to the most recent example, the Independent Election Commission of Iraq conducted voting at sites in six cities and Washington, DC. The conditions under which the voting was conducted were even more liberal than in some U.S. states, allowing for same-day voter registration, permitting two among seventeen kinds of identification cards to be used, and permitting those Iraqi citizens held in detention to vote.8 Voting Precincts That Are of Questionable Validity As a result of the hurricanes, many voting precincts were damaged or destroyed, and thus, election officials merged and relocated some voting stations to reflect this situation. Yet, the NAACP regional office in New Orleans also physically reviewed each of the sites selected by the election officials and confirmed that several sites were in unattractive and unusable locations. A review of merged voting precincts by this writer revealed that 60 percent of those moved or merged were in areas largely inhabited by blacks.9 Moreover, changes in the voting precincts were not decided upon nor publicized to voters in a manner and in sufficient time that would allow those voters to identify their assigned polling location in advance of the election. Neither was polling place access made easy, given a recent decision by a district court judge that required individuals to observe a state law that required individuals who were monitoring the elections to maintain a distance of 600 feet from the polling station. The Unavailability of Voter Rolls The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had at its disposal a list of evacuees that it serviced in various states—a list that also was useful in that it reflected the location of both actual and potential voters. The list had to be cross-referenced or merged with the pre-Katrina voter registration list in order to establish

THE NEW ORLEANS MAYORAL ELECTION

7

the whereabouts of registered voters, but it was a potentially valuable resource for identifying the universe of eligible voters in this election. However, this list was given by FEMA to the Louisiana Secretary of State Ater, who refused to provide it to city officials. This meant that candidates for various offices were unable to use the list to contact potential voters to campaign, thus denying some potential voters important information about those who were running for various offices. The maladministration and mishandling of the displaced resident list is not only a change in voting procedure that required clearance by the Justice Department, it is also a violation of the National Voter Registration Act, which aimed to make voter participation easier.10 The Difficult Procedures of Absentee Voting Act 40 was passed within a context that sought to extend to displaced voters the kind of benefits that overseas and military voters received, including liberal access to the absentee ballot. However, the process required individuals who would vote by absentee ballot to submit an application that could be obtained from various sources, including the state’s Web site. Thus displaced individuals had to apply for the ballot, receive the ballot (which is twenty-five pages long), then mail it back to the Secretary of State or the New Orleans Registrar’s Office, whose mailing address had been temporarily moved to Baton Rouge. Given the abnormalities with the mail system in the state, the city of New Orleans announced in March that it would construct ”cluster boxes” for the receipt of mail for those areas that experienced considerable storm damage. Nonetheless, persisting problems with mail service may have resulted in some displaced not receiving their ballots in a timely manner. As a result of these problems, absentee ballot request forms were distributed by officials and local community organizations to displaced persons and organizations serving them outside the city and the state. The Requirement for First-Time Voters to Appear in Person Louisiana election law requires individuals voting for the first time to vote in person, but allowed those who registered in person to cast their vote by absentee ballot if they submitted an affidavit notarized two witnesses with an understanding that they waived their right to a secret ballot. The problem with arriving in New Orleans in person to register, however, was that under the current financial circumstances of Katrina evacuees, this requirement amounted to a modern day poll tax. The Placement of Satellite Voting Station inside the State Satellite voting sites were located within ten cities around the state, but many evacuees who resided in trailers were located in trailer parks outside of the cities, where public transportation was generally not available. Thus, although a displaced resident may have been located within the state, they still may not have had efficient access to polling stations without adequate transportation networks. Therefore, local as well as national organizations such as the National Coalition on Black Civil Participation, the Coalition of Black Trade Unions, and the National Association for the

8

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Advancement of Colored People focused on providing transportation to such sites. Why the state could not mobilize extensive transportation networks is not known. Given that black residents of the city of New Orleans were found statistically to have experienced the brunt of the hurricane because they were less likely to own private transportation, the stationing of such in-state satellite sites in a context where officials fail to provide transportation should be regarded as a practice that violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits actions that dilute the black vote. THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT PRE-CLEARS

THE

ELECTION

Despite the extensive problems outlined above, some of which clearly violate the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department precleared the election in New Orleans on March 16.11 As described, the state election plan called for sending mass mailings to evacuees to inform them of voting procedures, such as procedures for requesting absentee ballots and the establishment of satellite voting centers in the state. However, that plan did not include the designation of satellite voting centers in the adjacent states of Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia where the majority of the evacuees were deposited. The basis of the Justice Department’s decision to preclear the New Orleans election was that the procedures did not amount to “retrogression” of the voting status of blacks (meaning they did not worsen the position of minority voters) and that the state had no affirmative obligation to enhance such opportunities to vote. Their argument was that although “the state may well have done more under the circumstances,” because the state did not cause the circumstances that diminished the opportunities for voters to vote, their efforts were sufficient under the law. These arguments, however, received strong objection by individuals such as U.S. Senator John Kerry, who wrote Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, saying: “I do not understand how the Department of Justice could approve a plan that threatens the civil rights of hundreds of thousands of citizens rather than postponing the upcoming elections until a time when a suitable plan could be developed.”12 The lack of an adequate reply by the Justice Department leaves open the question of why neither the state nor the federal government adopted a more aggressive plan under the circumstances and thus why they abdicated their ultimate responsibility to enhance the quality of democracy under which its citizens ostensibly live. VOTER MOBILIZATION: THE “TWO-TRACK” STRATEGY

The election was approached by blacks under the two assumptions cited above, which was that organizations would work to assist those who desire to vote by attempting, by legal means, to remove the barriers to voting and by mounting assistance projects to provide information, transportation, and other resources to potential voters, while at the same time mounting “election protection” efforts. This effort required 50–150 volunteers, who were needed to greet voters coming from both out of state and outside the city and to direct them to appropriate voting locations, that, in most cases, had been established. Many of these volunteers, including those who came from the surrounding colleges such as Xavier, Southern

THE NEW ORLEANS MAYORAL ELECTION

9

University, and Dillard, would also man transport systems, child care facilities and feeding stations. Polling station workers would be sent to high-performing voting districts in the Uptown section, Gentily and Pontchartrain Park, to distribute information and handle questions about election procedures, especially where there was some doubt about people’s voting eligibility status. Volunteers were also going door to door in Algiers and the West Bank of Orleans Parish and other neighboring areas to “pull” voters out. The central base of operations was the Greater Urban League headquarters on Canal Street, which served as the main field office for poll monitors. There was also a legal command center staffed by attorneys to answer questions coming in from the field.13 Other organizations including the churches, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, the NAACP, and others sponsored transportation for displaced residents wishing to vote—buses of voters came from Atlanta, Baton Rouge, and other cities. These buses were organized through Ebenezer Baptist Church and Greater St. Stephens Full Gospel Ministry, among others. In order to stimulate voter turnout and to guard against voting rights violations, the Reverend Jesse Jackson organized a march in New Orleans on April 1. It was a spirited affair that drew more than 5,000 people, who marched over a route that included the Gretna Bridge. In the ensuing rally after the march, speakers repeatedly referred to the juxtaposition of the New Orleans election and the pending Voting Rights Act reauthorization sitting before Congress. Reverend Jackson said: “All citizens have the right to protect their right to return. We are looking to establish jobs, training, and contracts. Now it is up to the state and local officials to carry the ball in the state legislature. No matter what we sacrifice today, [this march] is not as long as the march from Selma to Montgomery.”14 The march to Gretna was organized, in part, to highlight the fact that on September 1, 2005, when several hundred black people who were flooded out of their homes fled over that bridge, attempting to access higher ground in the town of Gretna, they were met by armed law enforcement officials who forced them to go back. This march, along with a previous one led by former Georgia Representative Cynthia McKinney, may have created the circumstances that led to the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision to review the blockade. At the time of this writing, the state’s investigation of the incident had been turned over to the Orleans Parish District Attorney for possible legal action. At the same time, it was an opportunity for the legal and civil rights organizations that provided the infrastructure of support to meet, and in that setting, they were able to confirm their sphere of operation, tighten cooperation with various groups by clarifying their roles, and discuss overhanging legal problems and logistical considerations. The meetings were not only important but reflected an impressive display of black organizations working together to achieve the common goal of facilitating the right of people to vote. THE VOTE

When Ray Nagin ran in the 2002, he did so as a former Republican cable company executive—a political outsider who was relatively unknown but stood out in a

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crowded field with an anti-corruption, clean-government campaign, and with strong ties to the city’s white business establishment. He managed to win the primary election with 29 percent of the vote against Richard Pennington, then went on to defeat him in the runoff 59 to 41 percent. The 2006 race for Mayor of New Orleans featured twenty-two candidates from various walks of life in the city, including Kimberly Butler, then-Clerk of the Criminal Court and chief elections official. However, the press focused on the two leading candidates, Mayor Ray Nagin and principal challenger Mitch Landrieu, with an outside chance given to Ron Forman, head of the city zoo and an aggressive fundraiser with strong business connections. Landrieu was the brother of the Mary Landrieu, who is the current U.S. Senator, and son of the last white mayor of New Orleans, Moon Landrieu, whose term ended in 1978. In the April primary election, Nagin received 38 percent of the vote to 28 percent for Landrieu, with Forman running a distant third at 17 percent. In the May 20 runoff, Nagin defeated Landrieu by 52 to 48 percent.15 The April 22 election attracted 298,000 voters, 63 percent of whom were black, so the issue at hand was essentially whether enough of the black voters together with a coalition of whites wanted change. That black voters desired change was indicated by the fact that Nagin appeared to garner the lion’s share of the black vote even though many of the poorest citizens could not get out of the city and ended up at the Superdome. Then, in an effort to recoup his standing with black voters in the runoff, Nagin suggested that in the reconstruction, New Orleans would become itself, a “chocolate city.” The extent of support that Nagin received following Katrina stands in stark contrast to the 2002 election, in which he received a mere 40 percent of black voters support.16 It is also possible to suggest that the impact of the black electorate on the selection of leadership in the city was formidable to the extent that Mayor Nagin took into consideration their sensitivity to issues such as the size or “footprint” of the city, by the inclusion of the Ninth Ward in the priority areas for rebuilding. Before the election runoff, Mayor Nagin accepted the recommendations of a reconstruction taskforce that he had created, known as the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, that a moratorium be placed on the rebuilding of flood-prone areas, including the lower Ninth Ward. However, opposition to this recommendation forced Nagin to alter his position and ultimately agree that all areas of the City were a priority for rebuilding.17 In fact, race played an even stronger role in the runoff election, given the expectation that the election between Landrieu and Nagin would be influenced, in large part, by the proposals for rebuilding that they put forth. Neither candidate, however, made any bold, effective, or clear proposals that could be attacked by the other. Instead, both candidates were purposefully vague, and Landrieu was loath to attack Nagin too sharply for risk of alienating black voters, since his own fortunes depended upon construction of a biracial coalition.18 Black voter turnout in the April election was 36 percent or 108,153, a modest performance in light of the 45 percent turnout in the 2002 election, and the estimated 30 percent turnout in the black sections lent strong credibility to the view that blacks had to overcome substantial barriers to vote.19 Overall turnout in the May runoff election was estimated to be about 43 percent overall and about 50 percent among

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black voters, a phenomenal number given the obstacles that voters had to overcome. Nagin’s voting bloc was comprised of 80 percent of blacks in majority-black voting precincts and 20 percent of the white vote, largely from the Uptown area, while Landrieu won the rest of the city’s white precincts. However, the fact that black voters came back to New Orleans from wherever they were in the country to provide Nagin a winning margin proved that their vote was not so much about Nagin as it was against the attempt to wrest control of the city from black leadership and by so doing, not only to disenfranchise them but to disempower them politically, and thus to affect their permanent displacement. This would give their opponents the opportunity to refashion New Orleans as they wished, free of the domination of a black majority. As such, the black vote was less, then, about Nagin, and more about their own investment in the city, its history and culture, and preserving a future in which they continued to see themselves as vital players through an act of political accountability. THE ELECTION’S IMPACT

ON THE

RIGHT

TO

RETURN

In effect, the post-Katrina election was black New Orleans’s modern-day civil rights movement, a moment in time when they chose to upset expectations that they would not turn out strongly and, as such, also upset calculations that the city would be reconstructed without having to take their views under consideration. As a member of the Katrina Survivors Association in Dallas shouted in response to the group’s chairwoman Katie Neason’s cry of “Let’s go do it” as she and others filed out of a bus that brought them to New Orleans to vote, “We’re back, we’re back. . .and we’re going to be at the table.”20 On the other hand, some white conservative votes for Nagin were born of the same calculation as when he was first elected—that he would be more amenable to their control than Landrieu, who had his own base of support through the State legislature and his family’s political status Therefore, to support Nagin would both localize city power under their control and do so through the a black leader, thus avoiding rancorous racial politics. This was something of a miscalculation of the power of black voters, many of whom had characterized Nagin as ”Ray Reagan” in his first administration and who were acutely aware of their interests in the rebuilding process. Proof of this is that they have influenced and redefined Nagin’s leadership in the post-election period when the contests for control of the plans for rebuilding have been tended both by legislators in Baton Rouge and in the city. The Louisiana State Legislature created a Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA), which constituted the vehicle through which funds would be channeled to the city and other areas for the rebuilding process. And, although the LRA was to work with the city at the primary level of planning, it has in fact developed its own policy postures. Thus, the connection between the Bush administration and the LRA is a linkage that has involved the White House in a process governing the control and expenditure of arguably the largest sums of urban redevelopment funds in American history. Many of the wishes of the grassroots citizens in the city, then, would be dependent upon the behavior of their representatives on the city council, a lineup that was also changed somewhat by the elections. Nagin had governed in his first term with

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strong support from a coalition that included Oliver Thomas, the highly regarded council chair; Jay Batt, a white businessman; and Jackie Clarkson, an at-large member.21 However, both Batt and Clarkson were defeated. Among the four members who often opposed Nagin, only one was defeated. The net effect of this was to shore up a level of accountability by the council to citizen demands. Some evidence of this newfound accountability is made evident by the city council’s recent efforts to establish its own planning process, one involving community hearings and deliberations, to create a unified plan for land use, infrastructure enhancement, and wetlands rebuilding. With Ron Forman having lost the election, the wealthier whites in New Orleans felt they had no direct involvement in the planning process and thus sought and attracted the financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation to develop a more comprehensive planning mechanism. However, that mechanism was perceived by grassroots community activists to be a substitute colonial system in which blacks were reduced to subordinate role players—they effectively intervened in the city’s attempt to establish a memorandum of understanding between the foundation and the city council. In another example, the mayor proposed wage increases for police but only firstyear firefighters on the logic that firefighters, unlike other city civil service employees, received a 2 percent annual pay increase mandated by state law. However, a majority of the city council voted an increase for all members of the police and fire Departments that was eventually upheld by the mayor.22 Finally, in April of 2006, an August 29 deadline was established by the city government for homeowners to clean, gut, and board up damaged homes. However, after the election, the council voted to extend that deadline for several more months, in effect acknowledging the complexities surrounding verification of land ownership, contacting home owners, and completion of other administrative procedures. The council also voted to exempt the entire Lower Ninth Ward from that process, largely in response to the views of activists who argued that the city had allowed derelict homeowners to abdicate their responsibility to clean up their properties before the hurricanes, thus the unusual circumstances should result in a greater degree of leniency.23 IMPACT

OF THE

“TWO-TRACK STRATEGY”

The “two-track strategy” largely worked in this case, first through the mobilization of various interest groups and civic organizations that came together with city officials to express their electoral choices in a surprisingly effective manner. As indicated above, blacks were able to vote in significant numbers not only by physically returning to the city but also by overcoming the difficulties associated with the first-time voting, absentee voting, and provisional balloting procedures. The fact that the state legislature and the state administration did little to greatly ease the voting process in light of the context within which it occurred says much about the political obstacles encountered by displaced voters in a state largely dominated by a Republican establishment (even though a U.S. Senator and the Governor are Democrats). The election also illustrates the continued and effective resistance mounted by a largely black Democratic establishment.

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13

The objections to the election raised by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the Reverend Al Sharpton, the NAACP, the National Urban League, and others were also important as a backdrop to the federal legislative process that was occurring during Congress’s reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. As indicated above, the Justice Department precleared the election and in doing so said that it was not unusual for the jurisdiction in question to prematurely implement changes in the election procedures while the Justice Department was considering the case. Unusual actions like this from the Justice Department raised questions about whether or not Republican legislators would attempt to legalize them in the process of the Voting Rights Act reauthorization. Hearings pertinent to reauthorization were conducted by the House Judiciary Committee, under the leadership of Representative F. James Sensenbrenner, from October 25, 2005, to November 9, 2005.24 Two things occurred to mitigate the decision to bring court action after the election. The first factor was that the election turnout of blacks appeared not to have been damaged to the extent feared, although blacks were disproportionately hurt by the electoral structure. Nevertheless, their vote was large and influential in the final analysis, promoting the feeling that justice had been served by their own actions. Then, the Voting Rights Act was eventually reauthorized on July 13, 2006, by a vote in the House of Representatives of 390 to 33, with most of the votes in opposition coming from Southern Republicans. Moreover, the amendments to the Act corrected the flaws in the process of preclearance that were the result of the Supreme Court’s rulings in Bossier Parish and the Georgia v. Ashcroft cases that set a confusing standard for evaluating of whether changes in districts harmed or helped minority voters. The Voting Rights Act was subsequently passed in the Senate by a nearly unanimous vote of 98 to 0 and signed into law by President Bush. CONCLUSION The danger, however, in the positive impact that voters have had to date on the decisions of the mayor and city council is that the center may not hold. Time is an issue because the further the election and the hurricane’s impact recede into the past, if a critical mass of residents does not return, black power will slip ineluctably into the reservoirs of those who are able to wait and profit from the barriers to the right of return. Black New Orleanians may find themselves stripped of the spirit of resistance and turning from their history to something new. The potential exists in that a mayor with a background rooted in the white power structure, still somewhat unsure of the strength of his fidelity to the black community, is still vulnerable to the previous forces that initially produced him. Moreover, the possibility of the negative pull of time occurring is great also because of the massive barriers to the right to return, rebuild, and restore life posed by the challenges that displaced residents continue to face. This analysis suggests at least three formidable problems. The first is the inequalities of power in the various levels of control of spending and the regulations devised for spending by the White House through FEMA, the state through the Louisiana Redevelopment Authority, and the city through the local planning boards. The FEMA/LRA nexus would appear to be the most important, given the $110 billion that been allotted for

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RONALD WALTERS

Louisiana reconstruction and the $12 billion allotted for the city of New Orleans itself, while the city government will have to adjust to rules that they design. Those rules doubtless could have the imprimatur of wealthy, locally connected private interests as well. In fact, the second contradiction is the superior ability of private interests to compete for land, political legitimacy, and other resources in order to promote their interests in developing a business-friendly area. That has been the driving force behind the reluctance of city leaders to vigorously support programs that would provide for the speedy return of poor and low-income residents who require affordable housing for purchase and rental. Third and finally, the Bush administration’s Justice Department will have responsibility for the implementation of the Voting Rights Act until 2008, and it has exhibited a troubling pattern of laggard enforcement of the law. It has precleared changes in voting procedures such as the Georgia photo identification requirement and changes in other states that have had the capacity to disenfranchise black voters. So, despite the passage of the VRA, its enforcement will have to be monitored. If it is not, the political paradigm in New Orleans could change quickly if voting procedures, approved through the preclearance process, continue to make voter participation difficult. That could promote city officials who could enact legislation that opposes not only the specific issues involved in the right of return but that also has the affect of undoing the right itself. Since Dahl’s time, tools such as public opinion polling have also illustrated with a degree of specificity the wishes of the electorate. In this case, the Iraq-Katrina relationship exists as reflected by a September 2005 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, which finds that while 93 percent of respondents say that Katrina is the worst natural disaster in their lifetime, 63 percent say that New Orleans should be rebuilt.25 However, a November 2005 poll of ethnic groups by New California Media found that blacks disapproved of the Iraq war the most of all groups. In particular, 77 percent of blacks, 69 percent of Hispanics, 60 percent of Asians, and a plurality of whites opposed the war. Moreover, blacks also privileged the elimination of poverty by the highest score (blacks, 58 percent; Hispanics, 43 percent; Asians, 38 percent; whites, 36 percent).26 Nevertheless, a USA Today poll also found a twenty-point decline among those who said they “would definitely return” to New Orleans between October of 2005 and August 2006.27 So I recommend a minor correction of Robert Dahl’s thesis that elections rarely give specific mandates to the winners by suggesting that when the issue faced by voters in an election is large enough, it constitutes a rather specific target, such that the result of the voting may indeed be informative. In this case, the perception of blacks was the specific issue of the extent to which they would be allowed to return and to participate in the life of a reconstructed New Orleans. And the political answer was resoundingly positive. NOTES 1. Robert Dahl, A Preface To Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 131. 2. Ibid, 132–34. 3. Ronald Walters, Freedom Is Not Enough: Black Candidates, Black Voters and American Presidential Elections (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).

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15

4. See also Acts 2005, No. 220, para 4, Jan. 1, 2006; Acts 2005, No. 431, para 1, Jan. 1, 2006; Acts 2006, 1st Ex. Sess. No. 2, para 1, Feb. 23, 2006, at the following URLs: http://www.legis.state.la.us/Iss_doc/Iss_house/RS/18/Copy%20of%20RS%2018 and http://www.legis.state.la.us/Iss_doc/Iss_house/RS/18/Doc%2081629.html. 5. Telephone discussion, Ms. Kimberly Butler with the author, February 23, 2006. 6. James Parks, “Homes Gone, Lives Destroyed: Now Katrina Evacuees Try to Keep Right to Vote,” PoliticalAffairs.net, April 12, 2006, Blog.aflcio.org. 7. Letter, State Senator Cleo Fields to John Tanner, Voting Section Chief, Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice, March 7, 2006. 8. “Voting Registration Update: Procedures,” Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, http://www.Iraqvote.org/ (accessed June 2005); Idem, “Iraq Election Polling Sites in United States Announced,” idem, (accessed December 11, 2005). 9. Clerk of the Criminal Court, Election Administration, “Polling Place Changes,” April 22, 2006. Presents changes of April 22 with the status of voting precincts as of March 20. This data was compared to ward racial data from the Department of State, Parish Report of Registered Voters as of March 7, 2006, Orleans Parish. My analysis indicates that of the wards with 99–100 percent changes in voting precincts (Wards 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 16), five of the seven had majority black populations. 10. “FEMA Voter Data Dispute,” The Institute for Southern Studies Newsletter (February 23, 2006). 11. Peter Whoriskey, “Election Plan for New Orleans Approved,” The Washington Post, March 17, 2006. 12. Senator John Kerry, letter to John K. Tanner, Chief, Voting Rights Section, Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice, April 3, 2006. 13. Author’s notes. 14. Author’s notes. 15. Mayor City of New Orleans, Louisiana Secretary of State, Parish Election data, 2006. 16. Cathy Booth and Russell McCulley, “Will Ray Nagin Win Redemption in New Orleans?” Time, April 10, 2006, online edition. 17. Coleman Warner, “Candidates Playing It Safe on Land Use,” New Orleans TimesPicayune, May 13, 2006, online edition. 18. Gordon Russell, “Mastermind Puts the Mayors in City Hall; Political Strategist’s win Record Will go Down in N.O. History,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 11, 2006, online edition. 19. Mayors Election, Primary Election Results, Department of State, New Orleans Parish, 2002. 20. Gwen Filosa, “Voters Determined to Take a Stand; Many Drive In to Make Sure Voices Are Heard,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 21, 2006, online edition. 21. Bruce Eggler, “Re-elected to Council,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, April 23, 2006. 22. Bruce Eggler, “Panel Defies Nagin on Raise,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 25, 2006, online edition. 23. Bruce Eggler, “City Council Eases the Gutting Law,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 26, 2006, online edition. 24. House Committee of the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution, “Voting Rights Act: The Judicial Evolution of the Retrogression Standard,” Hearing, November 9, 2005. 25. CNN/USAToday/Gallup, “Poll: Most Americans believe New Orleans Will Never Recover,” September 7, 2005. 26. Haider Rizvi, “Post-Katrina Poll Finds Americans Prioritizing Poverty over Terrorism,” Common Dreams News Center, http://OneWorld.net (accessed November 26, 2005). 27. “USA Today/Gallup Hurricane Katrina Survivors Follow-up Poll,” USA Today, USAToday.com/news/polls/tables/live/2006-08-20-Katrina-poll.htm.

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C h a p t e r

2

THE NEW ORLEANS THAT RACE BUILT: RACISM, DISASTER, AND URBAN SPATIAL RELATIONSHIPS DARWIN BOND GRAHAM

Far down Desire Street, off St. Claude Avenue, the main thoroughfare through the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Jackie stands outside her home on an unusually cold December day eating a hot lunch provided by Common Ground, a mutual aid organization formed immediately after Katrina struck. The entire contents of her house are piling up on the sidewalk beside her. All of the electronics—television, radio, fan, lamps, VCR, and a pair of heavy electric metal-framed medical beds—are sitting in one stack by the bumper of a wrecked Oldsmobile with four flat tires. Carpeting dragged from her house is sitting in another humungous mound. The largest stack of waterlogged belongings consists of miscellaneous furnishings—clothing, books, CDs, drapes, toys, and kitchen utensils. In a few hours a new pile will rise beside all of this; the mold-infested drywall and plaster that must be torn from her home’s interior, floor to ceiling. Inside Jackie’s house there are multiple brownish-yellow lines about two, three, five, and seven feet up on all the walls. Each line marks a level at which the toxic floodwaters settled for several days. The flooding took weeks to subside completely. On its way down it settled at many different levels for extended periods of time leaving graduated marks. The whole building smells of mold and mud. A crew of students from California (of which the author is a member) has been helping Jackie gut her house for several days. They don protective suites, respirators, goggles, and gloves. The entire house interior needs to be bleached and dried out before reconstruction can start, before Jackie can think about moving back in. In the front room

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of her home she’s collected a dozen porcelain sculptures, keepsakes, and as many photographs and personal papers as she’s been able to salvage. They’re all coated in the same powdery brown film. A haunting reminder of the floods that overtook New Orleans sits beached in her side yard. Constructed from a refrigerator, empty barrel, several ice chests, and fastened together with metal straps and nails, the improvised boat probably could have seated four to five adults and several children. A wide piece of scrap lumber about four feet long, a paddle, lies inside of it. Jackie’s neighborhood is dead quiet. The twin holly bushes that used to shine bright green with red berries on each side of the stairs up to the front porch are dead and withered. What’s left of the lawn is a brown, shaggy mass of dead blades. Jackie’s lived here a long time. She says the neighborhood has had more than its fair share of troubles in recent times, but that it’s a good place in spite of the bleak pictures painted by demographic statistics, press reports, and sociological works that condemn communities like this as oppressive slums caused purely by spatial concentration and segregation of a poor, predominantly black population. Community cohesion and people’s attachment to place have been profoundly powerful in the Ninth Ward (and New Orleans in general). William Falk’s research on “family and belonging in a southern black community,” articulates the transcendent power of place for those who dwell in geographies like the Ninth Ward, a power that appears capable of nullifying the negativity of oppression and that provides hope, happiness, and a collective means to struggle for those who live there: The real way in which one is related to the place is what matters. Thus, for a supposedly “poor” place. . .the real testament of faith for local people is: this is where I live. This is where my history is grounded. My biography is here. I know everyone here, at least everyone who matters the most to me. Here, me and mine are left to ourselves. I may not know much that matters to some other people, but I know well this place and my place in it. It is a place consisting of memories good and bad, but all of them are mine, things that cannot be bought or taken away from me. I am quite literally grounded in this place. It is in me; I am in it.1

Although it is poor, segregated, scorned by outsiders, criminalized, redlined, over-policed, and now finally flooded to Noahic proportions, New Orleans remains an assemblage of terrains imbued with so much meaning, nesting so much struggle and power, history and community. That residents of the Ninth Ward like Jackie are returning to rebuild, even without pledges from city leaders that their neighborhood will be provided with sewerage, gas, and electricity, is a testament to the power of place. But will New Orleans be bought now? Will portions of it be taken away from those who have called it home for so long? “Land grab” is on the tip of every poor New Orleanian’s tongue. Will community be taken away from those parts of New Orleans least able to protect themselves, or those neighborhoods most heavily targeted for sacrifice and redevelopment? According to Jackie, the Ninth Ward “used to be a very white neighborhood when my family first moved in. There were a lot of white families and some elderly

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folks. My family was probably the first black one to move in on this particular block. Soon after it became all black.” Her description matches the basic dynamics that sustain racial segregation; nonwhite urban migration and concentration, spillover into accessible and marginalized neighborhoods, reactionary white flight from many of these integrating areas, and the consequent social-urban ecological decline that results from environmental racism and neglect.2 The Ninth Ward, where Jackie has lived most of her life, started out as a neighborhood of white-ethnic immigrants and a large number of black families, all working class. The modest homes with ample backyard space, wide streets fit for automobiles, numerous churches, and small corner shops, was the American dream for many. The properties were cheap and prone to minor flooding during a hard rain, but nothing catastrophic, as long as the levees held. The Federal government, state of Louisiana, and the city and levee boards mostly upheld this promise through the twentieth century. The city certainly experienced floods, but nothing on the scale of Katrina. The worst were hurricanes Betsy and Camille, but these were not catastrophic by any means. Many older residents of the Ninth Ward have memories of Betsy, when their homes were flooded and they had to evacuate. New Orleans City Council member Oliver Thomas, whom Douglas Brinkley interviewed for his book about Katrina, recalled that “as a child, the scariest thing in my life was Hurricane Betsy.”3 Even though Betsy flooded parts of New Orleans, it wasn’t anything approaching catastrophic. In the 1960s, it was in everyone’s interest to make sure the levees held because back then much more than just the poor could be washed away. Industry, shipping, the growing tourism trade, and the workforce that these economic activities required meant that the levees and other infrastructure were supported in kind.4 By the 1960s, the Ninth Ward was fast becoming a segregated black ghetto. By the time Hurricane Betsy flooded parts of the city in several feet of water, the Ninth Ward and many of the most vulnerable neighborhoods had become virtually all black.5 In 1965, when President Johnson wandered into a church in the Ninth Ward days after Hurricane Betsy, ankle deep in water, he announced “This is your President, I’m here to help you!” However, he saw only black faces staring back at him from the damp flashlight-illuminated interior. Days later he would write in his diary that the shelter he visited was a “mass of human suffering,” and “most of those inside were Negro.”6 The differential impact that Betsy had on New Orleans’s blacks made a lasting impression, but it ultimately served as little incentive for future investments in the area’s infrastructure—to say nothing about redressing the environmental racism that was creating vast regions of vulnerability in and around New Orleans (and beyond). Indeed, global economic restructuring and the concomitant decline of the welfare state would soon lead to the opposite outcome; less social investment would be made in New Orleans’s infrastructure. This, combined with racial residential segregation, is part of the cause of the Katrina catastrophe. One precipitating event that set segregation into full swing in New Orleans was the integration of local schools. New Orleans schools were some of the first in the Deep South to be opened up by civil rights activists. After McDonogh #19 on St. Claude Avenue in the Lower Ninth Ward was integrated, many of the remaining white residents fled the city, believing that if living around blacks wasn’t bad enough, having one’s child attend school alongside them was the final straw. McDonogh #19

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is now known as Louis Armstrong Elementary School. Like other schools across the nation that were desegregated, many in New Orleans took on the names of prominent black political leaders and artists. One can only imagine what Armstrong would think of this. The school’s original namesake came from John McDonogh, a wealthy local slave owner and businessman who made a point of educating his slaves and financing a recolonization society that transported black New Orleanians to the newly established nation of Liberia. On his deathbed he willed enough money to open dozens of schools in the greater New Orleans area. Some still bear his name. Most were the sites of civil rights struggles aimed at integration. William Frantz Elementary is in the same neighborhood that Jackie lives in. It was here in 1960 that six year-old Ruby Bridges and her mother drove to school one morning. They were greeted by an angry mob of parents. Up until that date the school had been reserved for whites only.7 It wasn’t long till the school, and the neighborhood, became nearly all black.8 Many of the McDonogh high schools went through the same process (although some of them were open to blacks much earlier). That McDonogh’s name is so prominent in the greater New Orleans educational system tells us something about education and racial inequality in Louisiana. The man worked his slaves in order to build up real estate around the city and Algiers, and some of these properties would be turned into schools for slaves, the emancipated, and the poor.9 McDonogh was a peculiar but also typical benevolent white patriarch in the Louisiana slavocracy. Leighton Ciravolo, a sympathetic biographer of McDonogh, describes his fatherly ante bellum style in the following terms: “McDonogh, being a deliberate thinker, realized that people work best when there is hope ahead. This continuous labor builds up a work ethic. He in fact treated his slaves more as students than like the property they were considered legally. The philosophy involved is a modern, fundamental idea of proper education: if students see prospects in their lives, they will develop self-esteem and will become energetic, useful members of society.”10 McDonogh’s efforts to “better” Afro-Americans was in no small part a means toward his re-colonization plans—sending slaves back to Africa. Recolonization was an early attempt by some white Americans to “balance” the races and distribute them to their proper spatial locations. In the first half of the nineteenth century, this meant sending emancipated blacks to found Liberia, a nation where black men and women could live better lives, according to men like McDonogh. It would right the wrong—the wrong not necessarily being slavery but rather the mixing of races in the New World. The proper place for blacks was ultimately viewed as Africa, far from the North American continent, which according to the McDonoghs of the nation was destined to become a white civilization. This notion of relocating blacks to places where they will supposedly be better off—regardless of what black communities might think for themselves—is a thread that runs throughout the history of race relations in the United States. Although spatial notions of the proper places for certain races took particular forms in New Orleans, somewhat complicated by the city’s truly unique history and traditions, the city was by no means an exception. Exactly where this proper place for the black population was supposed to be would change dramatically after the Civil War and through the Jim Crow era, and

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again with the coming of World Wars I and II. Recolonization schemes would eventually be abandoned, maps of the Atlantic were shelved for maps of the city, and the spatial fix began take a more purely localized geographical form. Blacks were here to stay, so other means of geographically managing race relations would need to be sought. In white-dominated New Orleans, a city unique for always having had a large slave and free black population, this would mean living with slaves and mulattos, free and bound, manumission and recolonization plans, violent pogroms, marginalization into the “bottom of the bowl,” and eventually a localized spatial division of the races in a hyper-segregated pattern whereby race and class correlates to topographical elevation. Residential and other localized types of segregation of one sort or another was always a reality, but by the twentieth century it became the only spatial division of races that mattered. Patterns of racial segregation and spatial location in the socio-political ecology of New Orleans were by no means crafted through a logical process of intentional outcomes. There was no committee or organization seeing to it that race was manifested in space. The process was much more convoluted. Many actions were intentional, hostile, or outright violent. But many more were subtle, subconscious, and assumed. Peirce Lewis describes New Orleans from the Civil War almost until the early 1960s as having a regime of racial segregation defined by its micro-spatial ordering. Prior to the civil rights movement and the end of legally sanctioned segregation, blacks and whites lived much closer to one another. Residential segregation was ordered in a complex patchwork in which clusters of predominantly black blocks would be encapsulated within super-blocks. On the main avenues and outer fringes of these super-blocks lived whites and more affluent citizens. According to Lewis, “such patches of black population by no stretch of the imagination can be called ‘ghettos’. . .these Negro neighborhoods of New Orleans were quite small and multinucleated, with fuzzy boundaries.”11 This peculiar residential pattern was due in part to the custom of building slaves’ and servants’ quarters in back of the master’s house. Jim Crow segregation in New Orleans adopted this spatial design, and there was very little pressure to change it until the black freedom movement of the 1960s. As black communities began to question the norms and laws of Jim Crow in the middle of the twentieth century, this type of segregation had begun to give way to large contiguous areas within the city populated by blacks at rates approaching 80 to 90 percent. These areas consolidated the black population most intensely in the lowest, most vulnerable, and marginalized portions of the city. For New Orleans, like much of the Southern United States, the “proper” spatialracial regime was a problem of enormous proportions for the dominant-class and working-class whites who sought to separate themselves from blacks, a problem that had to be continually reworked as the region developed from a plantation economy to sharecropping and shipping, and finally the industrial production, transport, and tourism economy. To earlier New Orleanians, miscegenation had been identified as the most pernicious effect of an improper proximity amongst the races, but so, too, were rebellion, maroonage, crime, and loss of morality associated with spatial concentrations of blacks. What had always made New Orleans’s problems of racial geography even more intractable for the ruling planter class was the relative abundance of free blacks and mulattos from early on. Later, racial geographies would be

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rearticulated to deal with the changing economic and political circumstances of blacks and whites in the city. One way of understanding the Katrina catastrophe is that it is the product of the latest racial geographic regime in the Gulf Coast, one not all that different from the immediate past, but certainly very extreme in the degree to which nonwhites and the poor have found themselves relegated to extremely vulnerable positions within the socio-political ecology (and with very few resources to deal with this vulnerability). Hurricane Katrina’s effects were structured by the spatial reordering of New Orleans since the mid twentieth century that came about directly through racial segregation, and its consequences are being played out under the new politics of race—a politics in which racial hierarchies and inequalities are being rearticulated and fashioned in novel ways that mask the racist causes and consequences.12 From the 1950s on, white New Orleanians moved just outside the city limits, separating themselves from the Ninth Ward and other increasingly black neighborhoods. Many whites migrated east, just a mile or two into St. Bernard Parish, separating their new homes from the old with a set of railroad tracks, a military reserve, and an ample sized patch of green space. Many more moved into Jefferson Parish to the west. The push and pull forces that motivated white flight were many. They included racist yearnings for a segregated society that was being fundamentally challenged, but also economic forces and technological breakthroughs that made suburbanization possible. St. Bernard Parish became a destination that promised secure jobs, a large affordable home, and distance from the ever-darkening “chocolate city.” Beyond city limits in the Parish, St. Claude Avenue becomes the St. Bernard Highway, and Claiborne Avenue becomes Judge Perez Drive. The homes in St. Bernard are much newer than those in the Ninth Ward. Many of them are two stories tall and almost every last one is made of sturdy brick. The houses in the Ninth Ward are mostly small wood-framed structures. In St. Bernard, the yards are larger, and the streets twist and turn in the curvaceous fashion that is a hallmark of the modern suburban development. The trees are taller, and one can presume that, before the floods, the grass was greener on this side. St. Bernard Parish was flooded just as deep and long as the neighboring Ninth Ward. Only the area’s sturdier infrastructure kept it from taking as bad a beating from the winds and rain—that and the fact that the worst effect of flooding was only felt in the Lower Ninth Ward where levee failure created a wall of rushing water that leveled several square blocks, picked up and moved homes and cars, and crushed anything in its path. Arabi and Chalmette, the first two towns in St. Bernard adjacent to the Ninth Ward, were 96 and 92 percent white before Katrina hit. Both towns have a poverty rate below the national average of 12 percent. Homes in Arabi are valued at a median of $77,000, with comparable houses in Chalmette worth about $10,000 more (for the New Orleans metro region, this is very high). In New Orleans’s Ninth Ward, 36 percent of Jackie’s neighbors live below the poverty line. Some blocks have astronomical rates of impoverishment with more than half of all residents living in poverty. The Ninth Ward is virtually all black today except for the southern section around the edge of the French Quarter, which is not coincidentally on higher ground and separated from the rest of the ward by St. Claude Avenue’s four lanes and a median. Home values are much lower in the Ninth Ward even though

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ownership rates are incredibly high.13 This is spatial segregation on the local level, and it is characteristic of the larger pattern that can be discerned at the citywide level. For the first half of the eighteenth century, St. Bernard Parish was a French colony (as was all of Louisiana). Planters established themselves on the high ground near the banks of the Mississippi and used African slaves to raise sugarcane and indigo in the rich soils deposited over several millennia of delta building. The natural levees up and down river from New Orleans were developed in the same manner. Thus, New Orleans began and thrived as a port city surrounded by vast plantations.14 (Even today the region’s most important economic activity takes place on “plantations” outside the city—many of the Port of Southern Louisiana’s facilities are named after the properties that used exist there; bulk goods are shipped from Angelina Plantation, Hope Plantation, Goldmine Plantation, and so forth. Some of the refineries and chemical plants along the “cancer alley” corridor are also located on industrial lots still called plantations.) The slave-based economy flourished through thirty years of Spanish rule, the second brief French dominion, and American control until the Civil War. All the while, New Orleans expanded rapidly, becoming the largest Southern city (the sixth largest in the United States) by 1860. After the war, many emancipated slaves left the rural parishes of Louisiana for New Orleans. Others stayed as sharecroppers and small farm owners alongside Spanish and German immigrants and the propertied upper class. Until the end of World War II, St. Bernard remained a rural backwater—its total population a mere 7,000, according to the 1940 Census. In 1950 its population exploded. Several large factories, including an aluminum works, a sugar refinery, and an oil refinery, provided an economic base for the working-class population that moved in. The majority of this growth took place right on the edge of New Orleans’s city limits. Builders provided spacious homes for the new suburbanites. State policies and practices within the real estate and banking industries promoted racial segregation at the expense of nonwhites. Blacks were kept out via norms and laws. By 1970, more than 50,000 people lived in St. Bernard Parish, most of them closer toward the New Orleans end. White families moved into the new residential developments, finding employment in the factories that were moving out of New Orleans. Jefferson Parish, on the opposite side of the city, experienced a similar pattern of growth. Both parishes experienced rapid economic and population growth. Nonwhites, meanwhile, were restricted inside the city limits of New Orleans, unable to gain employment in the booming exurban industries or purchase a home in the rapidly expanding (and financially appreciating) suburban neighborhoods. These new dynamic places were not theirs to enter. They were forced to rely on whatever they could manage within the city limits. This was the consolidation of the new spatial regime of race that jelled after World War II and solidified after the 1960s. As industries left and investments dwindled, times became tougher for those workingclass and poor populations restricted geographically (and by nonspatial means, of course). Redlining was rampant. Property values in black neighborhoods stagnated, jobs became increasingly scarce, and major redevelopment projects, like the I-10 freeway, cut through the social fabrics of these communities, laying waste to business districts and cultural centers like the Claiborne neutral grounds.

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Left in the Ninth Ward and other formerly mixed working-class districts, many poor black New Orleanians were able to purchase their homes and build surprisingly vibrant communities and some degree of wealth, all in spite of their situation. However, the overall costs outweighed the benefits. White racism was rearticulated in new forms during and after the civil rights movement. Across much of America, geographical segregation that created powerfully different life chances became a paramount means of maintaining the racial hierarchy that had previously been constructed through other less spatially deterministic forms. In New Orleans this created an especially vulnerable poor black population, but also much vulnerability amongst middleclass blacks and whites who fled the inner city only to settle in swamp lands no more fit for habitation than the Ninth Ward or the “bottom of the bowl.”15 The socio-political ecology resulting from the push for racial integration and reactionary suburbanization (propelled by the white population’s possessive investment in whiteness that promised a maintenance of privilege in the suburbs) built a cityscape under sea level, surrounded by a maelstrom for a river on one side, lakes to the north, and rapidly disappearing marshes to the south and southeast. In 1965, Hurricane Betsy exposed the harm wrought by this regime of racial segregation and disaccumulation structured into the geography of greater New Orleans. Betsy was a preview. Katrina, a disaster of far larger magnitude, has irrefutably affirmed this point.16 As of July of 2006, Jackie’s house sits quietly on Desire Street, gutted, its former contents hauled away, but little more progress has been made on it. Her neighbors are filtering back in slowly, many of them just to survey the damage and salvage a few belongings. The street is mostly deserted, however. Most inhabitants of the Ninth Ward have few savings to spend on reconstruction. Few of them have flood insurance. What wealth they had was literally embodied in their homes. Now it’s in no condition to use as any kind of equity. Other streets have more activity. Some are bustling with trucks, hammers, generators, and crews of men and women gutting interiors and fixing rooftops. The Ninth Ward’s pace of reconstruction has been slow, but it appears to be on track. More and more lights can be seen flickering in windows at night. Many families have returned and parked trailers in their yards. Children roam the streets on bicycles, making occasional forays out to Claiborne Avenue to the Family Dollar Store to buy candy and soda. Once, New Orleans was named the “Crescent City” because it was literally shaped like a slender moon, following a big bend in the Mississippi. Most of the houses, businesses, churches, and schools were built on the high ground closest to the riverbank. Then it waxed in size, filling in the low-lying areas east and west, bounded only by Lake Pontchartrain above. The way things are going politically, it looks as though New Orleans might once again become the Crescent City in shape as well as name. Half of the city’s population may never be able to return. Many of their homes, businesses, and places of worship might be leveled and turned into parks or more expensive housing. Residents now refer to the wealthy parts of town that compose the bright edge of this crescent as the “sliver by the river.” To carry the lunar metaphor even further, one can imagine the New Orleans that existed preKatrina as a crescent moon, a crescent only because of its black core. The city’s black majority has long been the core of its cultural and economic vitality. But this core is unseen, like the shaded side of the real crescent moon. Politically speaking, many

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black and poor residents, returned or otherwise, believe that the city’s powerful want to tear out this black core but keep its cultural products—music, food, language, history, and art. It will be the aesthetic sort of crescent moon, a crescent without a shaded core; the convex portion will be punched out, and sitting on it, perched on the bottom lip of the hook-shaped moon, will be the representation of that black-Creole, selling the city, selling voodoo, sin, gumbo, and the blues to the world at large. The politics of rebuilding New Orleans are incredibly complex, but not without precedent. Major disasters throughout American history have more often than not been followed by intense political jockeying among economic and political elites in order to retain control of local and regional government or wrest it from one another. Redevelopment schemes have always emphasized the various and competing spatial interests of different groups cut along lines of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. Capital has often responded to widespread destruction in a Schumpeterian fashion by taking advantage of the liquidation of finances, firms, and the physical landscape to refashion whole new designs for locally based accumulation. Social movements in the forms of place-based mobilizations, racial coalitions, and labor organizations have arisen to meet the innumerable challenges facing different populations after disaster events. Early on, the most powerful lobby in post-Katrina New Orleans was Mayor Ray Nagin’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOB). Composed mostly of local business elites (real-estate developers in particular) with a vested interest in growthmachine politics,17 the Commission also seated prominent artists, several black businessmen, and a few putative community leaders. Its vision for the future of New Orleans promotes the city’s “culture” and music, improving government effectiveness, and radically reshaping the urban landscape and overall footprint. Although the BNOB Commission has disintegrated due to lack of funding or political stability, its vision for New Orleans represents the thinking of city elites, real estate developers, many powerful civic leaders, and large portions of the middle and upper classes (predominantly whites). Early in 2006, several commission members publicly affirmed the right of all neighborhoods to be rebuilt on several occasions, but the Commission made no commitments to provide resources for residents to do the rebuilding. BNOB leader Joseph Canizaro even happens to be the chairman of the Urban Land Institute, a think tank that advised the city in Katrina’s wake that many neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward should definitely not be rebuilt. Apparently, the Commission has not held any recent public meetings or moved forward with any of its proposals. But this does not necessarily mean that its vision is not being pushed forward by the new official planning process or through the haphazard reconstruction efforts underway. According to the Times-Picayune, as of July 2006, the city has only managed to craft a “plan to create a plan to rebuild New Orleans.”18 This latest official framework for reconstruction, called the Unified New Orleans Neighborhood Plan, is described as, “a single comprehensive land-use planning process, which will coordinate the recovery of more than seventy distinct neighborhoods.”19 So far so good, but the plan appears short on substance, despite being funded to the sum of $4.5 million from the Rockefeller Foundation and Greater New Orleans Foundation. The Louisiana Recovery Authority has decided to throw its weight behind this scheme,

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making it the current front-runner among planning schemes. Mayor Nagin and other officials have said that any planning already conducted by third parties will be incorporated into this master plan for the city, giving those neighborhoods that have used private resources to rebuild a further lead in the chaotic process. Initially the BNOB Commission proposed giving neighborhoods a window of one year to rebuild, and that if at the end of that timeframe a community had failed to show its “viability,” it would be demolished, entirely re-planned, and redeveloped. As of July 2006 it is not clear whether this mandate is being upheld. Nagin was forced to distance himself from this proposal after multiple communities voiced their opposition to it. If this idea is adopted in some form or another, exactly who will define progress, and what will be considered a neighborhood “comeback,” are subjective determinations that remain to be seen. As of today, it appears that the massive public outcry (coming from diverse quarters of the city) defeated this point on the wish list of large-scale real estate capital. As one walks through the streets of New Orleans, it’s hard to tell what the storm wrought and what neglected conditions were already present. Much of the city had already been slummed by racist real estate practices and the realities of poverty. Current planning policies are heavily weighted toward those neighborhoods inhabited by more affluent residents and those not hit as hard by the storm, where organizing a community recovery effort will occur smoothly or will not be needed at all. The BNOB Commission’s final report, released on January 11, 2006, spells out the Commission’s ambitious plans in detail.20 Its proposals are worth studying because they represent a wish list for the city’s power elites and will carry weight regardless of the fact that BNOB has been all but disbanded. Their recommendations for rebuilding embrace many of the design philosophies that can be found in new urbanism, a school of thought within the professions of urban planning and architecture that emphasizes the aesthetics of city life (without its harsh realities). To rebuild the city’s neighborhoods, they state, reconstruction must be “built on neighborhood history and culture; respectful of historic block patterns, architecture, and landscape; mixed income communities with a diversity of housing types; parks and open space connected to a city-wide system; city-wide accessibility through transit; neighborhood centers that provide a high quality of daily life.” It all sounds very appealing, but it’s premature to assume that the actual reconstruction process will abide by these principles in any equitable shape or manner. Statements such as this also tend to avoid issues of race or economic justice by using language such as “culture,” “diversity” and “mixed-income” solutions. The Commission’s report is laden with empty appeals to the disadvantaged alongside benign-sounding code words for demolition and gentrification. Some are probably there only to appease the gods of ecological sustainability and justice—while other recommendations actually mean what they say and will be carried out in the fullest. The BNOB Commission’s plans, as well as the other efforts that will influence the Unified New Orleans Neighborhood Plan, must all be synthesized by city authorities before they can unlock the funds currently held by the Louisiana Recovery Authority. Residents across the city responded with outrage and suspicion to the officials’ early plans, especially Nagin’s comments about issuing a moratorium on building permits

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in sections of the city like the Ninth Ward. (Nagin later withdrew this idea and allowed building to commence). One aspect of the BNOB Commission’s thinking that may be incorporated into the final planning (explicitly or tacitly) is its identification of four “opportunities for neighborhood rebuilding” based on location and the extent of resulting damage from the hurricane and floods. “Immediate opportunity areas” are those that sustained little or no damage and can be improved without further debate. Their future is assured. Not surprisingly, these areas mostly cover the Uptown, Garden District, French Quarter, Bywater along the Mississippi, and northernmost portions of the Lakeview and Gentilly communities—affluent and predominantly white neighborhoods. True to their label, residents in these neighborhoods immediately began repairing their homes. Contractor vehicles can be spotted on every street. Power tools are buzzing and hammers are pounding away at homes that suffered mostly minor wind damage, fallen trees, or leaky roofs.21 Planning in these zones of the city is somewhat redundant because of the minor damage they sustained and the overabundance of resources at the disposal of residents and other property owners. The second major classification for neighborhoods is termed “infill development areas.” The Commission recommends that these areas be consolidated under public and private ownership, that development plans be drafted, and proposals solicited from demolition and construction firms. The areas in question would probably be consolidated under the auspices of some sort of redevelopment agency. (The BNOB Commission proposed the creation of a Crescent City Redevelopment Corporation [CCRC], which would sell land back to private developers). Again, not surprisingly, neighborhoods deemed “infill development areas” are predominantly black and poor sections of the city. They include large swaths of the Ninth Ward, Bywater, Gentilly, Mid-City, Tremé and Central City, and the McDonogh, Whitney, and Fischer neighborhoods across the river in the Algiers district. Under the Unified New Orleans Neighborhood Plan, the mechanism by which large tracts of land are seized and redeveloped by real estate capitalists is likely to take a different form, but some means of consolidating properties is in the works. The BNOB Commission was also asked to look ahead and create an overall vision for the kind of city they’d like to see. Among the more novel proposals is one to build a network of high-speed light rail commuter lines linking New Orleans with its suburbs—Jefferson, St. Bernard, St. Tammany Parish, and the Slidell region. Most critical studies of rapid transit around the nation have concluded that the benefits of such a system will primarily go to those on the ends of the lines—the suburban bedroom communities and the central business district. Those in the middle, the neighborhoods the rail lines will cut through, will see very little utility in such a system.22 The benefits to the real estate lobby and large employers concentrated in the downtown area could be immense, as parcel values for office and retail developments would likely multiply in value, and a light rail system would guarantee a white-collar professional suburban workforce. Whether neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward or the Tremé live to see this future is an open question. Whether these neighborhoods will retain the communities—the residents, families, and local businesses that give them their culture and traditions—is even more uncertain. The plans for the regional rail system gives some insight into the larger goals and vision of the interests originally behind the BNOB Commission and now at work in

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other organizations and agencies or behind the scenes as private actors to influence the Unified New Orleans Neighborhood Plan. The New Orleans they envision is a global city, surrounded by an affluent suburban professional workforce. The central business district will be the center of the region. Its office towers will fill every morning with professionals and white-collar workers from outlying areas. It will be an information economy instead of what New Orleans has been, a working class city with a large population of supernumeraries (the structurally unemployed). Much of the city will become parkland. The metropolitan region’s population will shrink by half. Families will also move back into the central city districts. On top of what remains, redevelopment will create neighborhoods in the architectural style of the past. It will attempt to recapture the sense of community lost in the past half century by deindustrialization and suburbanization. Condos will fill in the old warehouses, the racially cleansed housing projects like Lafitte, and the new towers built upon old barren blocks. Townhouses will parallel city streets just beyond the downtown. The streets will be sanitized for the newcomers. In some respects, census data confirms that New Orleans had already begun to move in this direction. This vision for New Orleans is motivated in part by a desire among exurbanites to return to the city and rediscover its magic. New Orleans, like many cities, is being seen as an appealing place to live. But sadly, it’s a desire that will be fulfilled only in the displacement of those who currently reside in central cities, those who were abandoned in Tremé and the Ninth Ward decades ago. In New Orleans it’s a return that will be made possible by exploiting a disaster. In other cities it’s simply called gentrification. But in post-Katrina New Orleans, it will be called “logical,” the “return of nature,” “opportunity,” and “market forces.” Or, in the now-infamous words of U.S. Representative Richard Baker, God did it.23 The disaster that hit New Orleans in the form of a hurricane and flood wasn’t a freak event. It wasn’t a break with the normal as much as it was a punctuated moment of continuity in the longue durée of this city. Katrina is business as usual, packed into an exclamation point. The eradication of poorer neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward has long been the dream of many of New Orleans’s more affluent and privileged. One of the primary ways racism and socio-economic exploitation works is along spatial lines. Racialized and poor populations are related to by the dominant society most concretely in terms of geographical proximity. The different regimes that subjugate poor and nonwhite communities must calibrate a proper spatial distribution of populations. Post-Katrina New Orleans appears to be unfolding toward a new type of spatial ordering unlike anything New Orleans has known in the past. There are like-minded people in every American city who just want the ghettos or the “wrong side of the tracks” to disappear, and they don’t care how or where they go, as long as it’s somewhere else. It’s what helped create the conditions for this latest disaster in New Orleans. But other complex factors (economic, cultural, and happenstance) push and pull on the demographic order. This peculiar American creed of racism and cruel indifference toward the poor characterizes much of our urban history. It was there when plantations spread along the banks of the Mississippi and slashed into the delta swamps. It didn’t end with the Civil War or the civil rights movement. It raged in 1866 when ex-Confederates and police officers massacred black and white radical Republicans at their New Orleans

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convention (which was also fundamentally a struggle over who would rebuild New Orleans and how it would be rebuilt following a civic disaster of another sort). It was there when public housing went awry and when the I-10 highway destroyed the Claiborne neutral grounds. It was there when white parents pulled their kids out of integrating schools and fled to St. Bernard and Jefferson Parishes. What floats to the top now in this time of uncertainty and indecision is a desire that many have for a new New Orleans. Leaving the city a half-century ago was a privilege made possible largely along lines of race. But leaving the city took its toll on the spirits of many. The desire for an urban way of life always remained in the hearts of some suburbanites. That sort of magical urban place was calling. Coming back to the city after Katrina is the new privilege. The Bring New Orleans Back Commission articulated the first statement of this vision. As the process progresses and takes a new form, we still find that there is little or no room in this vision for the Ninth Ward and neighborhoods like it. There is certainly no room for public housing like the St. Bernard projects. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has now called for its demolition along with the Lafitte, C. J. Peete, and B. W. Cooper Homes.24 After a jazz benefit concert for the reconstruction of New Orleans, poet Amiri Baraka explained, “What Bush wants is to make New Orleans like his mother— shriveled and colorless.”25 Whether or not Bush wants this, the city has certainly shrunk in numbers. Without a serious federal commitment, far beyond what has been allocated to date, and without strident activism at all levels to ensure that federal funds and policies are administered fairly, any effort to rebuild the city will end in an outcome that can only be characterized as racial cleansing and the eradication of the poor. (We are already seeing this in the year since, but we are also seeing diverse social movement activity.) This is the other side to the politics of rebuilding New Orleans. It’s the grassroots response. It’s agitating, organizing, rallying, documenting, building, cleaning, and speaking out. For every speech that Nagin gives, for every new official planning scheme announced, there are a thousand volunteer work crews helping to revive shell-shocked neighborhoods. For every visit Bush makes to the Gulf Coast, there are thousands of college students, activists, former residents, and citizens making the trip to the Big Easy to provide assistance to indigenously led groups like Common Ground, the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, C3, United Front for Affordable Housing, Survivor’s Village, and others. Back on Desire Street in the Ninth Ward, Jackie’s house stands empty. It’s July, the midst of a new hurricane season. The house’s insides are completely gutted. If she can muster up the money to install new drywall and carpeting, fix the holes in the roof, and to buy the bare necessities of life like a bed and kitchenware, she could move back in before long. If she does, she might be alone. However, judging from the activity on her street in the past few months she’ll probably be moving back in alongside some neighbors. Every day, more and more residents are coming home. Many are still just stopping by to survey the scene, but quite a few are breaking out their tools and putting good, old-fashioned sweat equity back into their humble houses. Whether or not they can make enough of a difference and help to rekindle the shattered social bonds and a sense of community is uncertain, but the future relies upon them, not on some city official who measures and deems a “viable comeback” or on some cityor state-sanctioned planner who imposes wonderful new plans upon them.26 The

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point here, if you ask many people, is to rebuild the community so that it can resist the inevitable attempts that the powerful will make to destroy it, attempts that always seem to be made when a “natural” disaster provides an alibi.

NOTES 1. William S. Falk, Rooted in Place: Family and Belonging in a Southern Black Community (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 2. Social scientists have been reconsidering the dynamics of racial succession in neighborhoods, noting that ecological approaches that focus entirely on spatial variables like the number of black residents on a block, the particular patterns of black residence in relation to whites, and so forth are inadequate to explain how it is that certain neighborhoods become all white or non-white (for instance, see Kevin Fox Gotham, “Beyond Invasion and Succession: School Segregation, Real Estate Blockbusting, and the Political Economy of Neighborhood Racial Transition,” City & Community, 2002 1, no. 1 [March 2002]: 83–111). Nevertheless, the decline of black neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward are due to structural racism in American society, no matter how complex it is. 3. Douglass Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (New York: Harper Collins, 2006) 45. 4. Additionally, the perceived legitimacy—however shaky—of the welfare state during this era (and up until at least the 1980s) meant that social investments and social consumption protecting places like the Ninth Ward from catastrophic flooding were uncontroversial and ensured. The levees were funded, and so were welfare programs for the growing population of dislocated workers (supernumeraries) pushed out of work by rapidly transforming monopoly sector industries, most of whom were black Americans who lived in places like the Ninth. See James O’Connor’s Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), for a detailed theoretical treatment of how this political-economy that sustained social investment/consumption in levees, city services, and welfare (broadly defined) is inevitably outpaced by a fiscal crisis that leads to cutbacks, the sort of which weakened New Orleans infrastructure and put much of its population in a position of critical vulnerability. 5. For a more historical treatment of environmental racism in New Orleans (particularly the segregation of poor blacks into the “bottom of the bowl” and the back swamps), see Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); also, Peirce F. Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of An Urban Landscape (Cambridge: Ballinger, 1976). 6. Quoted in David Remnick, “High Water: How Presidents and Citizens React to Disaster,” The New Yorker, October 3, 2005. 7. Ruby Bridges, Through My Eyes: Articles and Interviews Compiled and Edited by Margo Lundell (New York: Scholastic Press, 1999). 8. Morton Inger, Politics and Reality in an American City; The New Orleans School Crisis of 1960 (New York: Center for Urban Education, 1969). 9. As of July 2006, many of the public schools in New Orleans remain closed. In their place have sprouted up dozens of charter schools. Prior to Katrina, the New Orleans public school system resembled many other inner-city districts; it was chronically under-funded and highly segregated. Bill Quigly, lawyer and professor at Loyola University of New Orleans, says, “Public education in New Orleans is mostly demolished and what remains is being privatized. The city is now the nation’s laboratory for

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10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

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charter schools—publicly funded schools run by private bodies. Before Katrina the local elected school board had control over 115 schools—they now control four. The majority of the remaining schools are now charters. The metro area public schools will get $213 million less next school year in state money because tens of thousands of public school students were displaced last year.” Bill Quigly, “Ten Months After Katrina: Gutting New Orleans,” Dissident Voice, July 1, 2006, http://www.dissidentvoice.org. G. Leighton Ciravolo, The Legacy of John McDonogh (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 2002). Peirce F. Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of An Urban Landscape (Cambridge: Ballinger, 1976). Howard Winant, The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. U.S. Census, http://www.census.gov. Thomas Ingersoll describes New Orleans as an urban core surrounded by rural plantations, a situation of such proximity and almost conflicting roles that the city became a microcosm of America as a whole, torn between rural and urban life, slavery and wage labor, and the industrialism of the factory and the plantation. Thomas N. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South 1718–1819 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999). The “bottom of the bowl” refers to some of the lowest lying grounds in the city—literally in the center of New Orleans, far below sea level. Note that I am not arguing that Katrina was a greater disaster because of the storm’s characteristics. Rather, Katrina was a greater disaster in the sense that the disaster was the sum of several parts, both natural (the storm) and social (the political system, economic structure, race relations, poverty rate, condition of infrastructure, et cetera). John Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). “Nagin Sets Guidelines to Plan Rebuilding,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, July 5, 2006, http://www.nola.com/newslogs/breaking/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_localbreaking news/archives/2006_07_05.html. Susan Saulny, “New Orleans Sets a Way to Plan Its Rebuilding.” The New York Times, July 6, 2006. Wallace Roberts & Todd, LLC, “Action Plan for New Orleans: The New American City,” Bring New Orleans Back Commission, Urban Planning Committee, January 11, 2006. As I write this piece I sit on the porch of a double-shotgun home in the FaubourgMarigny neighborhood. I moved in a week ago. According to my neighbor, who is a longtime resident, the flood waters only covered the street by a few inches. The worst damage in this section of the city was to walls and roofs from the wind. See Joseph A. Rodriguez, “Rapid Transit and Community Power: West Oakland Residents Confront BART,” Antipode 31, no. 2 (1999). Rodriguez summarizes some of the literature critical of BART’s claims that it would benefit low-income communities along its lines and also describes the black community’s political opposition to various aspects of the BART project, including its overall purpose, impact on black business districts, and union racism that locked nonwhites out of from high-paying construction and operation jobs. Baker’s words, first reported by the Wall Street Journal were, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did” (“Washington Wire,” Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2005). Filosa, Gwen. “HUD Demolition Plan Protested: Residents Say They’re Being Shut Out of City.” New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 16, 2006.

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25. Larry Blumenfeld, “America’s New Jazz Museum! (No Poor Black People Allowed),” Salon, July 7, 2006, http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/feature/2005/10/12/jazz/index.html. 26. However, one planning/architectural firm working on the Ninth Ward through the New Orleans Neighborhood Rebuilding Plan is Stull and Lee, an African American firm with experience in designing racially conscious architecture that is sensitive to poverty and economic development in places like West Palm Beach, Florida, for instance. The official planning process may not be all that bad for the Ninth Ward after all. See Stull and Lee Inc., “A Community Vision for the Future of the Lower Ninth Ward: Presentation of Initial Sketch Plan Alternatives,” June 17, 2006, http://www.nolanrp.com (accessed July 6, 2006).

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RACE-ING THE POST-KATRINA POLITICAL LANDSCAPE: AN ANALYSIS OF THE 2006 NEW ORLEANS ELECTION KRISTEN CLARKE

INTRODUCTION The elections that were conducted in New Orleans in the spring of 2006 were historic in a number of regards. These elections were the first conducted following a major natural disaster and with significant numbers of residents displaced from the city. In many respects, these elections tested our nation’s commitment to ensuring broad levels of equal and open participation in the political process while raising profound questions regarding the impact of delayed elections on the democratic conscience. Ultimately, these elections will figure significantly into the rebuilding and reconstruction process that is now unfolding. This essay will describe the positive and negative aspects of the elections while analyzing their larger relevance to black political power in the Gulf.

PREELECTION STRUGGLE There was no shortage of controversy surrounding the spring 2006 elections in New Orleans. In the weeks and days leading up to the elections, many black leaders called for a delay to give people enough time to get back to the city to cast their ballots.1 Others called for satellite voting—the establishment of strategically placed centers around the country that would have allowed displaced voters to cast their ballots from their temporary places of residence. Given the displacement patterns that

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emerged following Katrina, the placement of satellite voting centers in cities such as Houston, Atlanta, Memphis, Jackson, and Dallas would certainly have helped make participation easier for significant numbers of displaced voters. Although a federal judge was unwilling to order it,2 the body that could have crafted and implemented legislation authorizing the satellite voting centers was the Louisiana State Legislature. Ultimately, the legislature voted against this ambitious undertaking, arguing in part that they lacked the ability to establish secure computer databases out of state and that they were uncertain that officials in the respective jurisdictions would comply with their mandate.3 Instead, legislation was passed that allowed for limited satellite voting in ten parishes around the state: Caddo, Ouachita, Rapides, Calcasieu, Lafayette, East Baton Rouge, St. Tammany, Tangipahoa, Jefferson, and Orleans.4 These centers, based at the registrar’s offices in each of the ten parishes, helped make voting easier for the large numbers of African American voters who remained displaced in-state. Despite the problems and challenges with these elections, there are some notable and appreciable aspects to the process. For one thing, these elections were conducted despite significant damage to the city’s infrastructure. Numerous polling locations were destroyed or damaged beyond repair.5 The identification of alternative locations that would provide voters the opportunity to cast ballots was likely not an easy feat. In addition, many poll workers needed to be recruited and trained in order to ensure that there were sufficient numbers of personnel working the polls during the elections. Notice of all changes regarding the elections needed to publicized to voters who were now dispersed throughout the country—a task that must have been particularly difficult given the fact that many displaced voters were in a constant state of flux. This reality was further complicated by the unwillingness of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to share updated address lists on the grounds that it would breach privacy restrictions. Although these tasks were accomplished under difficult circumstances, providing more time would have benefited voters.

THE LACK OF POLITICAL WILL TO ENSURE BROAD PARTICIPATION IN THE NEW ORLEANS ELECTION In many respects, the recent elections in New Orleans will serve as a guidepost for future elections conducted under emergency circumstances. With the specter of intensifying international conflict lying on the country’s shoulders and a world that is increasingly vulnerable to natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina will certainly not be the last tragedy to befall the country. The elections illustrates how much of a delay in the election schedule the public is willing to tolerate and reveals how aggressive officials are willing to be to ensure that displaced voters are able to cast their ballots. In general, it appears that the public will not tolerate a long delay in elections, in part because disasters embroil human emotions and spark political debate. Indeed, in the days following Katrina, blame was levied on local, state, and federal officials of all stripes, and there were immediate calls for the removal of FEMA Director Michael Brown, Governor Kathleen Blanco, and Mayor Ray Nagin at various points.6 It is difficult to suspend elections under these circumstances because emotions are running incredibly high and the public is eager to have some say about the

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type of leadership they want to help them get through the difficult period that inevitably lies ahead. Indeed, at least two lawsuits were filed by those seeking to expedite the elections. However, these elections also show that elected officials are unwilling to take aggressive steps to facilitate voting under these circumstances, perhaps because the scope of the tragedy did not reach far enough and officials have a hard time grasping the severity of the situation. The failure of the state to do more explains why many displaced African American voters may have wanted to participate in these elections but were unable to. Certainly, there are a number of other steps that could have been taken to make it easier for displaced voters to participate in what were arguably the most important elections in the city’s storied history.7 The out-of-state satellite voting centers are certainly one such measure that would have allowed those who had been unable to find a way back into the city to cast their ballot from their temporary domicile. Taking this concept one step further, an extensive period of early voting could have been made available at registrars’ offices around the country, giving displaced voters a wide window of time during which to cast their ballots. Preaddressed, prestamped ballots could have been made available at post offices around the country with a verification process established at the Orleans Parish Registrar’s Office for all ballots returned by mail. Problems with mailing lists aside, ballots could have been automatically mailed to all displaced voters, thus eliminating the requirement that voters first request their ballots and wait for their arrival. Finally, election officials could have conducted extensive voter outreach by negotiating with FEMA officials to make ballots available at FEMA Centers and during well-attended public meeting held around the country to educate displaced voters about the receipt of social services and benefits.

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In 2002, Ray Nagin ran a campaign that clearly appealed to white voters and business interests in New Orleans. He received marginal support from the black community (approximately 45 percent), with the majority of African American voters supporting his opponent, former New Orleans Police Chief Richard Pennington. Nagin’s lowest levels of support were in black enclaves of the city such as the Ninth Ward. However, white voters turned out to the polls in exceptionally high numbers, helping ultimately tip the scales in Nagin’s favor. During his time in office preceding Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Nagin did not enjoy a great reputation among the city’s black community. He continued to be regarded a mayor on behalf of white and monied interests in the city. However, the tide shifted in Nagin’s favor in the months following Katrina when it appeared that he was the only viable African American candidate to throw his hat in the ring for the mayoral race. Early polls suggested that among the large pool of candidates, Nagin, Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu, and Ron Foreman were the frontrunners. Analysts suggested that Landrieu was the more moderate and progressive of the three candidates; he was running on a platform that would have likely brought a more immediate impact on poor New Orleanians and increased the likelihood that poor, black voters might be able to make a speedy return to the city. Nagin’s victory,

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however, meant that an African American continued to hold the most powerful position in the city and reduced fears among many displaced black residents that the city would be rebuilt to their exclusion. Although Nagin came under sharp criticism for his now-infamous “Chocolate City” comment, some black voters interpreted this as a firm, if perhaps belated, promise on his part to maintain the racial status quo.8 Nagin’s victory in the most recent election reflects the fact that race continues to play a significant role in the political conscience of the Deep South—a reality that has not been altered by the hurricanes. African American voters in New Orleans are deeply concerned about holding on to their political gains and fear that the hurricanes may upset a delicately forged power balance in the city. Many black voters, particularly in the Ninth Ward, cast aside their profound disdain for Nagin out of a desire to keep the city’s twenty-eight–year-old black mayoral legacy intact.9 Likewise, white voters have seen the mass destruction of the city as an opportunity to rebuild a “new” New Orleans. Indeed, some white voters, the vast majority of whom are middle or upper class, have expressed a desire to see major reform to the social fabric of the city—a sentiment that some interpret as a desire for exclusion of the black poor.10 White voters saw these elections as a unique opportunity to put a new face on the city, while black voters feared what that face might look like.11 With these heightened stakes as a backdrop and despite the obstacles that displaced voters face, many endured long bus rides back to the city, found their way to one of the in-state satellite voting centers or cast absentee ballots in order to ensure that their voices would be heard. Although a sizeable number were not able to overcome the obstacles, the political will exercised by many African Americans evidences a real commitment to not only rebuild their homes but to maintain the long sought political gains that existed pre-Katrina. In this sense, Katrina presents interesting prospects for heightened black civic participation as communities throughout the Gulf are forced to confront the glaring specter of continued racism and assess the power balance that exists within their respective communities.

NOTES 1. “Protesters Call for New Orleans Election Delay: Jackson, Sharpton among Critics Claiming Vote Not Fair to Evacuees,” Associated Press, April 1, 2006. 2. See Wallace v. Blanco—litigation brought by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in the Eastern District of Louisiana seeking remedial relief to help ease the burdens on displaced voters. 3. “Bill fails to Change Rules for New Orleans Election,” Associated Press, April 2006. 4. Charles Lussier, “New Orleans Election Off to a Slow Start,” Baton Rouge Advocate, April 11, 2006, http://naacpldf.org/. . ./epp_katrina/Early_Voting_and_Satellite_ Locations.pdf. 5. “Committee OKs New Orleans Election Plan,” Associated Press, January 23, 2006. 6. Elizabeth Bumiller, “Casualty of Firestorm: Outrage, Bush and FEMA Chief,” The New York Times, September 10, 2005; Brown Puts Blame on Louisiana Officials,” CNN.com, September 28, 2005, http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/27/katrina .brown/index.html. 7. Kristen Clarke-Avery and M. David Gelfand, “Voting Rights Challenges in a PostKatrina World: With Constituents Dispersed, and Voting Districts Underpopulated,

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How Should New Orleans Hold Elections?” findlaw, October 11, 2005, http://writ .news.findlaw.com/commentary/20051011_gelfand.html. John Pope, “Evoking King, Nagin Calls New Orleans Chocolate City: Speech Addresses Fear of Losing Black Culture,” New Orleans Times Picayune, January 17, 2006. John Pope, “Black Precincts Buttress Nagin Victory,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, April 24, 2006. Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (New York: Perseus Books, 2006), 204–205. Manning Marable, “New Orleans Reconsidered: Race or Class,” Along the Color Line, January 2006; Ceci Connolly, “Ninth Ward: History Yes, But a Future? Race and Class Frame Debate on Rebuilding New Orleans District,” Washington Post, October 3, 2005.

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PROPERTY AND SECURITY, POLITICAL CHAMELEONS, AND DYSFUNCTIONAL REGIME: A NEW ORLEANS STORY D. OSEI ROBERTSON

INTRODUCTION We from a town where everybody drowned ... Everybody crying, ... There’s no doubt in my mind it was George Bush. —New Orleans Hip Hop Artist Lil’ Wayne1

On August 29, 2005, a series of events were put into motion that would change my life forever. The week before, I had been watching the news, observing a massive hurricane named Katrina move toward the Gulf of Mexico. This was an annual ritual, however. New Orleans and many other communities along the Gulf Coast deal with hurricane season every year. My main concern was for my family; they needed to leave. So I called my mother and father and urged them both to leave, which they did by August 27. Up to this point things were pretty much protocol; this was not the first time they had fled their homes as a precautionary measure. I thought I knew

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the drill—they would leave for a few days, there would be some minor flooding and roof damage, and the power would probably be out several days. On August 29 this annual routine turned into a nightmare. When the initial reports came in, it appeared that New Orleans had dodged a bullet. Small flooding and power outages constituted the preliminary reports. At approximately 1:00 a.m. on August 30, I logged onto a radio feed from a local CBS affiliate. Mayor Nagin was reporting that 80 percent of the city was experiencing major flooding, with up to ten feet in some areas. This couldn’t be happening. I called my father right away, and told him the news. I was afraid to call my mother, I was afraid to tell her what had probably happened to her house. By daybreak all news agencies were beginning to report the depths of the disaster. This was not the usual drill, and people would not be returning in a few days. Three major levees had been breached—the 17th Street canal, the London Avenue canal, and the Industrial canal. The place where I was born and raised was under water. As a native of the city, I found it very interesting to observe news analysts, scholars, and politicians making various assessments of the outcomes associated with Katrina. Some writers wish to highlight the impact of racism, while others focus on class-based discrimination.2 Although these dynamics are important parts of the story, many accounts fail to capture some of the deeper challenges that confront the city. New Orleans has been a dying city for the past fifteen to twenty years. To grasp the uphill battle that we face, it is essential to understand the political and economic context in the city before Katrina and how these factors will affect future rebuilding plans. Before beginning this analysis, however, I must first admit to bending a number of (traditional) social science rules. The usual stance of objectivity is one that I cannot claim. My vantage point is far from clear, clouded by reflections of my home. No matter where you lay your head, home is home—that place where your formulative experiences reside. Thus, because this event has affected my family and me, I must acknowledge that I am far from a distant observer. The role I occupy in this analysis is more like that of a participant observer selectively referencing “hidden transcripts.”3 In light of this position, I occasionally employ narrative and cultural devices in the analysis in an effort to tie the personal to the general electoral and political-economic dynamics this chapter explores. In addition to experiences and observations drawn from family and friends, I draw on traditional political-economic sources that include public opinion data, socio-economic statistics, and local periodicals. This is a study of New Orleans before and after Katrina. It begins with an examination of the electoral and attitudinal patterns in the city over the past couple of decades. This section concentrates on the mayoral office and African American occupancy of City Hall since the administration of Ernest “Dutch” Morial, with particular attention on Mayor Nagin’s first electoral campaign. The next section continues this theme by examining the transformation and shift Nagin made in his bid for reelection following the hurricane. Following an analysis of mayoral politics, the second section explores the city’s political-economic policies and performance since the 1980s. New Orleans was a struggling city prior to Katrina, and this section details some of the root causes of the city’s political and economic woes. In the final section, I offer some conclusions regarding the city’s future.

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NEW ORLEANS: AN OVERVIEW To accurately analyze the challenges the city of New Orleans faces in the future, it is important to be clear about its political, economic, and cultural history. Culturally speaking, New Orleans is unique; it is one of the most fascinating places in the country. The historical blend of Spanish, French, African, and Native American cultures has created a city rich in musical, artistic, and spiritual traditions. It was New Orleans that both gave birth to jazz and vanguarded its resurgence in the early 1980s. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the Bayou Classic, the Essence Festival, and Mardi Gras are all national events. Layered underneath the public view of such events as Mardi Gras are traces of very old racial patterns. For example, few outsiders recognize that there are two different Mardi Gras events that take place on Fat Tuesday. Whites historically have gathered on St. Charles Avenue and Canal Street, while blacks historically have gathered at the intersection of Orleans and Claiborne Avenues, where the Zulu parade ends. Additionally, the Mardi Gras Indians function as a living tribute to the associations between slaves and Native Americans. Politically, New Orleans has had African American mayors since the late 1970s. Following the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, several American cities witnessed a large surge in the number of African American voters, which increased the electoral strength of blacks. By the mid-1970s, it was not a question of whether an African American would be mayor, but when. Ernest “Dutch” Morial would follow an electoral path to City Hall comparable to that of Atlanta’s Maynard Jackson. Neither candidate was selected to run for office by the establishment. In New Orleans, Sidney Barthelemy was gradually being groomed by insiders for the seat, while Morial ran for election without strong ties to former mayor Moon Landrieu and his associates. Morial was from the Seventh Ward, the historical center of the Creole community in New Orleans, a community that exemplified what historian Arnold Hirsch has labeled “creole radicalism.”4 Though race has always been a part of American politics, in certain areas of the country there has historically been a deeper intra-group tension focused on complexion. Beyond aesthetic considerations, the main concern here is the general belief that Creoles (the earliest free blacks of mixed genealogy drawing from French, Spanish, and Native American peoples) were granted access to society’s institutions prior to darker blacks. Although the influence of the traditional Creole community has waned in recent decades, traces of these intra-group patterns still linger today. FLIPPING CHANNELS

In this day and age of cable and satellite TV, we often flip though channels, searching for our favorite movies, shows, news, or sporting events. Out of two hundred channels, for example, we may only regularly look at thirty or fewer channels, skipping several channels in search of our favorites. On the local level, many cable providers have public access channels that feature local activists, entertainers, and news. In the nineties, the local cable provider in New Orleans (Cox Communications) had a regular information program where managers and executives would update the viewing

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audience on various service issues as they related to Cox. It goes without saying that this was a flip-through channel: you passed it when looking for something else to watch. I recall asking a friend to tell me who was running for mayor in 2002, and he mentioned a few names. The only ones I recognized were career politicians Paulette Irons (a local state senator), Troy Carter (a city councilman), Jim Singleton (City Council Chair), and Richard Pennington (then-Chief of Police). But when my friend mentioned another name, Ray Nagin, my response was, “Who is that?” He said, “You know, the guy from Cox, the one always on their public access channel.” Like the city itself, politics in New Orleans has long followed a traditional path in that there are relatively few unknowns operating in the political landscape. Following “Dutch” Morial, mayors in the city were either longtime politicians or had links to political families. Some people felt that Sidney Barthelemy, because of his associations with the Landrieu administration, would be the city’s first African American mayor, so his election following “Dutch” was of little surprise. Marc Morial was the son of Dutch, and it was merely a matter of time before he ran for office. So when a businessman who was a political outsider announced his candidacy, I thought he had little or no chance. Little did I know that he would become a central figure in one of the most traumatic and challenging times that the city has ever faced. Many scholars of black politics distinguish between the first wave of BEOs (Black Elected Officials) that came to office in the late 1960s and early 1970s and a new crop of BEOs who began winning office in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The early BEOs, such as Carl Stokes, Kennith Gibson, and Maynard Jackson, gained political office through explicit appeals to their black voting base. “Most early black mayors,” Persons contends, “explicitly articulated a social reform agenda in their campaigns emphasizing issues of police brutality, the hiring of blacks in municipal jobs, increasing low-income housing choices,” and other areas associated with working-class and lower-class blacks.5 These city leaders were, in theory, carrying on the struggles of the civil rights movement within the institutional confines of local governance. None of these mayors were radicals or called for massive redistribution efforts while in office, but they at least gave the impression that they were concerned with the collective good of African Americans. Regarding this tradition, Walters asserts, “The essence of the problem is that the aggressive legacy of the civil rights movement contains the inherent notion of confrontation and pressure as a methodology for forcing major American institutions to legitimize black demands for justice.”6 This characterization of the first wave of BEOs has been contrasted with groups of candidates emerging in the late 1980s who neither in substance nor style seem to reflect the same concerns of those earlier elected officials. In many cases these women or men are seeking to “normalize black politics or to subordinate black demands to the normal workings of the political process and, thereby, delude it of its urgency and oppositional character.”7 In response to this growing trend, some scholars have attempted to conceptualize this process under the analytical heading of deracialization. Deracialization is a concept that analysts have advanced to account for the ways in which race has been downplayed by African Americans running for office in recent years. Specifically, it refers to the process whereby black

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candidates campaign without overtly emphasizing race or making direct appeals to issues that are associated with African Americans in an effort to draw white support. McCormick and Jones are among a group of scholars who have sought to fully articulate this concept. They define deracialization as a electoral strategy as “conducting a campaign in a stylistic fashion that defuses the polarizing effects of race by avoiding explicit reference to race-specific issues, while at the same time emphasizing those issues that are perceived as racially transcendent, thus mobilizing a broad segment of the electorate for purposes of capturing or maintaining public office.”8 In addition to this general concept, the authors suggest that deracialized campaigns may be divided into three parts: political style, mobilization, and issues. Political style refers to the manner in which candidates project themselves in a campaign, particularly in terms of presenting a nonthreatening or safe image to potential voters. The confrontational or protest image represented by first generation of BEOs is replaced with a candidate focused on racial reconciliation. Mobilization tactics refer to a candidate’s direct or explicit efforts to target African American voters, as candidates operating from a deracialized context make generic multicultural appeals to voters seeking to avoid alienating potential white voters. Issues directly associated with African Americans, such as police brutality or allocating minority contracts, are rejected in favor of racially neutral policy advocacy. Deracialized campaigns are largely dependent on two factors: the demographic makeup of the jurisdiction and the racial background of candidates. If a city, for example, has a majority minority population, one can generally assume that a minority candidate will easily win an election if they are running against a white opponent. But when there are several minority candidates, the minority vote is split, thereby increasing the chances that whites, or other minorities, will provide the critical threshold to win the election.9 For example, following Dutch Morial’s two terms in office, Sidney Barthelemy won his first term in office with 85 percent of the white vote. It is in these scenarios that the chances of a deracialized campaign increase. Looking at the 2002 election, one could argue that Nagin’s campaign reflected these factors in terms of political style, mobilization, and issues. In terms of political style, Nagin took the honest businessman approach, pointing to the fact that he had worked with various different groups in the business community. For example, he often pointed to his role as president of the local hockey team—the New Orleans Brass. As one of his supporters noted, “The Brass is a difficult group to work with. . . .There are about twelve partners, and they’re from five parishes, and they’re black and white, young and old. The only thing they have in common is that they’re all successful. Ray holds the group together with his humility, his pleasant demeanor and his unquestioned integrity.”10 In just about every discussion of Nagin leading up to election he was described as an effective businessman with an “off-the-cuff ” speaking style, and these were characterizations offered by whites. Because Nagin was not a career politician, he did not have connections to many of traditional political organizations in the city such as SOUL, BOLD, COUP, ACORN, or LIFE.11 “I don’t owe anything to a BOLD or a SOUL or a COUP or a LIFE, all that alphabet-soup stuff,” he asserted in one interview.12 All of these organizations are affiliated with political insiders, and if he made any direct appeals to ACORN or SOUL, for example, this could have been viewed as a direct appeal

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to African American voters. Moreover, as the Times-Picayune endorsement of Nagin noted, “He’s not tight with the city’s alphabet soup of vote-getting organizations.”13 In terms of policy issues, Nagin advocated a classical pro-business approach. Urban regime theorists often speak of different types of policies advocated by city administrators. Sites points to three types of regimes that scholars commonly employ in their analytical assessments: caretaker, pro-growth, and progressive. Those regimes that support classical liberal doctrines often advocate pro-growth strategies, in which the emphasis is on “market-oriented development, using incentives or public subsidies to promote the kind of economic growth favored by downtown interest.”14 Those regimes that seek to stabilize or reform government advocate caretaker (maintenance) positions in which developmental issues are largely avoided, “concentrating instead on fiscal stability and improvements in the provision of routine services.”15 And finally, those regimes that “seek to limit downtown expansion in favor of more community-oriented development” are viewed as progressive or social-reform regimes. Nagin advocated the path of pro-growth, with little or no concern for progressive or redistributive alternatives. One of the highlights of his platform was the suggestion that Louis Armstrong Airport should be sold or leased, and then the city could use the proceeds for rebuilding infrastructure. Another indicator of his racially neutral and pro-growth stance involved a proposed City Council referendum to raise the minimum wage $1 above the federal rate. He was the only candidate who opposed the referendum outright, while his opponents expressed support with reservations.16 In terms of style, mobilization, and policies Nagin was able to present himself as a nonthreatening candidate who focused on economic issues from a market or pro-growth perspective. There would be no threats of redistributive policies on his watch, and because of his lack of political ties, concerns about allocational abuses (awarding political appointments and contracts based on connections rather than merit) were minimal. A total of fifteen candidates were running for mayor, and prognosticators pointed to Pennington and Irons as the early frontrunners. One poll taken in early December 2001 indicated that voters favored Pennington (23.3 percent), followed by Irons (21.1 percent), Singleton (13.6 percent), and Carter (10.7 percent).17 At this point in the campaign Nagin was not on the political radar screen, and by early January he was receiving barely 5 percent in the polls. A series of allegations directed at frontrunner Irons caused an opening in the crowded landscape, with Nagin being the primary beneficiary,18 and by late January Nagin had increased his support to 11.9 percent. In a matter of two months he went from dark horse to frontrunner. In the February 2 primary election, Nagin received the most votes, 29 percent versus Pennington’s 23 percent. When Nagin made it into the runoff, endorsements and campaign contributions began to roll in. Several members of the political establishment threw their support behind Nagin, including Council Chair Jim Singleton, Councilman Oliver Thomas, and Councilman Troy Carter, while Pennington received the support of ACORN and the support of Mayor Morial.19 Allegations of corrupt business dealings were directed at Nagin, while Pennington had to answer questions about rumors of domestic abuse. Nevertheless, in a campaign that became very dirty, even by Louisiana standards, Nagin was able to hold on to his lead and be elected to office. He won his first term because he secured a larger percentage of

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the white vote, more than 80 percent. He was clearly a candidate embraced more by whites than blacks. In particular he was supported by the very influential business community. Looking at election results from 2002, Nagin won those areas heavily populated by whites (Appendix A). In the Lakeview and Audubon Park/St. Charles parts of the city, Nagin received almost five times as much support as Pennington. For example, in the Fourteenth Ward, which represents the center of old wealth in the city, Nagin received 5,782 votes compared to 1,635 for Pennington. In the Lakeview area (Fourth Ward), which may be the most segregated part of the city,20 Nagin had a similar winning margin of 5,949 versus Pennington’s 1,471. It may be noted, however, that Nagin made a strong showing throughout the city and won the election by more than 20,000 votes. In three of the largest wards that are predominantly black— the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Wards—Nagin won the majority of votes.

I ONCE WAS LOST,

BUT

NOW I’M FOUND: NAGIN’S RETURN HOME

“I can’t stand him,” I recall my mother saying in the immediate months following the hurricane. She was talking about Mayor Nagin. Since he had been elected in 2002, she would from time to time mention her general dislike for the new mayor. He was a new face, not part of the traditional old guard, and he secured his election by appealing to whites through his pro-business rhetoric. In the first election he won 85 percent of the white vote, compared with only 35 percent of the black vote. So when my mother mentioned her dislike for the mayor, it was not an isolated viewpoint. To a certain degree, the city was at a crossroads. The traditional Creole elite had no new candidates because both Barthelemy and Morial had secured successive terms. Although Pennington had been endorsed by outgoing mayor Marc Morial and Congressmen William Jefferson, the combination of last-minute scandals and Nagin’s alliance with the business community allowed him to be elected. Nagin entered office with a classic reform/pro-business agenda. In his inaugural address he suggested that the city needed to be a place where “the business community is heavily involved and invested in the growth and success of the entire New Orleans metropolitan area,” and he spoke of the need to put an end to “past parochial politics.”21 His reform agenda mainly centered on ending the high degree of corruption associated with previous administrations. Like the scandals that can emerge in Congress when a new party takes power, the target of many of Nagin’s probes were former associates of Mayor Morial; he also enacted a dramatic firing of hundreds of city workers (partially due to budgetary issues). Nagin did little to endear himself to the old guard, those associated with either the Barthelemy or the Morial regimes. He was not the typical Seventh Ward Creole. Nevertheless, incumbency in the New Orleans, as it is in most cities, was viewed as virtually a shoo-in. That was until Katrina hit. Instead of an easy reelection campaign, Nagin found himself in one of the most interesting reelection campaigns in recent state history. As mentioned earlier, Nagin won his first term by running a classic deracialized campaign, gaining that critical threshold of white support needed to win an election between black candidates. Following the hurricane there was general perception among blacks that Nagin shared a large responsibility for the incompetence of

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government in the first ten days after the storm. Local hip-hop artist Juvenile summed up the feeling of many in one of his songs: “Your mayor ain’t your friend he’s the enemy / Just to get your vote a saint is what he pretend to be / F__ him.”22 This is not surprising, considering the horrific experience the people of New Orleans went through during and after the storm; for one not to be angry would be a surprise. But given the large amount of public outcry following the storm, one would assume that a Nagin reelection would be virtually impossible, but this was not the case. KATRINA

AND THE

POLITICAL CONTEXT

Hanes Walton argues that any analysis of the field of black politics must first seek to identify the particular political context, spatial and temporal, in which the subjects are operating. He contends that black politics is not linear, nor does it replicate itself cross-nationally; instead, black politics is highly sensitive to the local context in which it is operating. Furthermore, “the political context variable is. . .a thesis that postulates that political behavior at either the individual or the group level is not independent of the political environments (a particular time and a particular period) in which it occurs.”23 Walton’s positions are reinforced by Kaufmann in her analysis of mayoral elections in Los Angeles and New York. Drawing from socio-psychological group interest theory, she contends that in times of racial conflict voting will be “polarized” along racial lines, whereas in the absence of racial conflict voting patterns will follow traditional cues such as party identification and ideology. “When elections take place in a conflictual environment,” Kaufmann contends, “voting behavior will likely reflect the temporal salience of these interests. However, when racial conflict recedes, voting behavior will likely revert to more normal political considerations.”24 Despite different theoretical origins, both Walton and Kaufmann highlight the salience of the political context, particularly at the local level. Before we consider the campaign efforts of the mayor, it is critical to recognize the immediate demographic byproduct (and therefore political opportunity) of the storm that immediately affected the political context. Katrina affected the political context in New Orleans in two key ways: attitudinally and demographically. The post-Katrina response by government agencies elicited a critical response on the part of blacks and whites. Although several national and local commentators attributed government mismanagement to Mayor Nagin, public opinion data suggest that both blacks and whites attributed more culpability to Governor Blanco and President Bush than to the mayor. Mayor Nagin had a 54 percent approval rating, compared with 33 percent for Governor Blanco, 23 percent for President Bush, and 22 percent for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.25 Looking more closely at the approval ratings of key actors, some racial differences are revealed. Nearly 60 percent of blacks approved, compared with 47 percent of whites. Only 24 percent of those who approved of Governor Blanco were white, versus 41 percent of blacks. Overall, blacks were more prone to direct responsibility at the federal government than at local or state politicians, except in the historically sensitive area of law enforcement. In the days immediately following the storm, a number of politicians seemed to be more concerned with “law and order”

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or “property and security” than with “search and rescue.” These cognitive cues were also reinforced by the physical byproducts of the storm. Demographically, initial surveys indicated that the city was now majority (roughly 60 percent) white. Over twenty candidates threw their hats in the electoral ring, with only two other African American candidates (the Reverend Tom Watson and Civil Clerk Kimberly Butler) in the race. There was a general feeling that white elites wished to exploit the forced mass exodus of blacks into a political advantage. One state representative even commented that the storm had accomplished what they were trying to do for years—clean up public housing (translation: get rid of poor blacks). Scholars of black politics have long discussed issues of gentrification and the increase in the number of low-income blacks being forced from central cities because of massive redevelopment projects. New Orleans has the potential to be the largest gentrification project in history, and there was a growing sentiment among African Americans that this was being planned. This demographic factor had a large impact on the public perception of blacks. Thus the political context that Walton speaks of had been significantly altered. Keeping in mind the contextual factors that affected Nagin’s attempt for reelection, we need to ask the next critical question: what type of campaign measures did Nagin undertake to secure reelection? CHOCOLATE CITY: THE ANATOMY

OF A

POLITICAL CROSSOVER

“What’s up with Nagin?” I recall asking one of my friends after Nagin’s comments on Martin Luther King Day. On MLK Day most networks were broadcasting sound bites of the Mayor stating that New Orleans would be a “Chocolate City” again. I wanted to know if I was missing something in the national media; maybe it was different in New Orleans. Mayor Nagin talking about New Orleans being a Chocolate City was as surprising to me as it must have been for some whites. “I don’t know,” my friend responded, “I think he might have been drunk.” He was joking, but this explanation seemed to be more plausible than the thought of a contemporary politician making an explicitly racial comment about the demographics of his jurisdiction. This was far from the political style that characterized him during his first term; he rarely made any direct appeals to African Americans. As the previous section noted, his electoral victory was largely due to white support; Pennington won a larger percentage of the black vote than Nagin. If Nagin represented a classic case of a deracialized campaign the first go-round, he was risking a key component of his electoral base by making these comments. Of whites, 52 percent indicated that they were offended by his statement, compared with, predictably, only 17 percent of blacks stating they were offended.26 The majority of blacks (66 percent) and a significant number of whites (42 percent) responded that they were not offended but thought he could have said it better. Contemporary politicians, both black and white, often speak in general terms absent of specific racial markers. When a politician says they are concerned about “soccer moms” or middle-class issues, they are indirectly referring to issues that largely concern whites. Conversely, when a politician starts mentioning “cleaning up housing” or more “law and order,” these are cognitive cues that convey to some whites their desire to eliminate any perceived threat posed by blacks.

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The issue is not whether or not Nagin should have mentioned his concern that African Americans return to New Orleans, but how he said it. What initially was seen as political misstep, may have been, in fact, a well-calculated move. The demographic shift toward a white majority was clear immediately after the hurricane, and any questions about how this would affect the political landscape were answered when the candidates were announced. While there had occasionally been a white challenger since Dutch Morial’s mayorship, there had never been more than two other white candidates in a campaign. With several white candidates running for mayor, it was clear that whites saw this as an opportunity to retake City Hall. Rather than deny the existence of this new political context, Nagin sought to abandon any hope of matching the large percentage of whites who supported him during his first election and instead focused on attracting a greater proportion of African American voters. This process would entail both national and local linkages. Although there is a significant degree of fragmentation within the black community, most blacks accept that they have a shared history and culture and view racism as still a salient component of American society (although in more indirect ways). Whether one chooses to label it as a cultural-historical dynamic or a variant of group identity (socio-psychological), there is a general sense of being black. As is often the case following serious incidents with racial undertones, most African Americans viewed the post-Katrina problems as indicators of racism. A small indicator of this are the lyrics offered by Mos Def on an underground remix released days after the storm: Its dollar day in New Orleans ... and Mr President he bout that cash he got a policy for handling the niggas as trash. . .27

Despite the claims of some “post”-oriented critics, cultural forms have always revealed a certain essence about African Americans, and the lyrics from this song seem to reflect what a large number of blacks nationally were thinking following the storm. These positions are empirically reinforced by some of the surveys taken following the storm. According to a New York Times/CBS News Poll, two-thirds of African Americans said that race was a factor in the government’s response, compared to only a third among whites.28 Data from a Pew Center poll also supports this view. Of blacks, 66 percent felt the government’s response would have been faster had the victims been white, compared with only 17 percent of whites. Predictably the event was a painful reminder to African Americans that racism still exists in this country, with 77 percent of blacks responding that “racial inequality still a major problem.” As in other polls conducted during this period, the majority of African Americans held President Bush responsible for the government’s incompetence following the storm, with 85 percent of blacks responding that he could have done more. The looting following the storm, additionally, was also viewed differently by blacks and whites. Of blacks, 57 percent felt that the looters were just “ordinary people who were desperate,” versus 38 percent of whites. Beyond the difference between

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white and black responses to the hurricane, these data also indicate that there was a national concern about the collective fate of blacks in the months to come. In terms of electoral considerations, several national organizations indicated their concern about the upcoming elections. They suggested that Louisiana officials were attempting to disenfranchise blacks by holding early elections. Initially, the Louisiana Secretary of State sought to postpone the election indefinitely, but a group of whites challenged this ruling in court. The court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and the election was scheduled for April 22, 2006. The NAACP and Urban League attempted to appeal the decision, but to no avail. These events were important because they indicate there was a certain level of national support for the candidacy of Nagin; in particular, there was the feeling nationwide that whites were trying to strip blacks of their voting rights. Locally, Mayor Nagin focused his attention on winning the support of African Americans, those still in New Orleans and those scattered across the country. He made a 180-degree turn in terms of style, mobilization, and issues, abandoning the deracialized tactics that had defined his first campaign. Both locally and nationally there was a huge uproar about his chocolate city remarks. At a Martin Luther King Day march the Mayor said, “We ask black people: it’s time. It’s time for us to come together. It’s time for us to rebuild New Orleans—the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. And I don’t care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day.”29 Despite the fact the comments were largely unfiltered in terms of the language he used, the Mayor did touch a sensitive issue among African Americans from the city—that whites were going to use the hurricane to significantly reduce the number blacks in the city. Not only did Nagin make frequent mentions of race in his Martin Luther King Day speech, but he also did so in speeches throughout the city and in places like Houston and Atlanta, where a large number of New Orleans residents had relocated. In one talk in Houston, the Mayor noted that none of the other candidates looked like him (i.e., black), while several campaign billboards in the city referred to Nagin as “our mayor.” In terms of mobilization, Nagin gained the support of ACORN, a communitybased organization seeking to address the needs of working- and lower-class African Americans. This group served a key role in both voter registration efforts and busing out-of-state residents to the polls. On a national level, the National Coalition of Black Civic Participation (an umbrella group consisting of the National Urban League, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights, and the Louisiana ’06 Coalition) assisted in holding mayoral debates in Houston and Atlanta and provided poll monitors in several sites.30 In terms of policy articulations, Mayor Nagin resisted recommendations by several groups to restrict building in areas such as the Ninth Ward. Many groups called for a selective repopulation of the city, starting with (disproportionately white) areas that had lower levels of damage. The mayor rejected this suggestion, announcing all areas could be repopulated but at the citizens’ own risk. De facto gentrification via a process of large-scale seizures of property is one of the key concerns of African Americans in the post-Katrina context, as the Ninth Ward east of Industrial Canal (New Orleans East) has long been viewed among the worst land (in terms of flood

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potential) in the city. However, to condemn the Ninth Ward would be political suicide for a candidate counting on African American votes to be reelected. The Ninth Ward is the largest ward in the city (in the 2002 elections over 40,000 votes came from this area), and New Orleans East has a large number of middle- and upper-class blacks. Overall, Nagin courted these areas, suggesting to African Americans on a consistent basis that he was their only hope for the future. Mayor Nagin’s reelection strategy worked, because of him and in spite of him. A total of twenty-two candidates were on the April 22 primary ballot, and Mayor Nagin and Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu finished first and second in voting. Nagin received 38 percent, Landrieu received 29 percent, Audubon Institute Director Ron Forman received 17 percent, Republican Lawyer Robert Courhig received 10 percent, and the rest of candidates each received less than 2 percent (the other two notable African American candidates, the Reverend Tom Watson and Civil Clerk Kimberly Butler received 1 percent each). Although Nagin finished first in the primary (securing nearly all precincts that were black), nearly 60 percent of voters voted for Landrieu, Forman, and Courhig. Scholars of voting behavior have long noted that runoffs can potentially serve as a form of vote dilution, and in races where the bulk of candidates are white, the general assumption is that their votes will be aggregated behind one candidate, thereby making it more difficult for the minority candidate to win. In theory, if Landrieu was able to secure the support of Forman and Courhig, winning the May 20 runoff should have been easy. Landrieu was able to secure the endorsement of Forman, but Courhig threw his support behind Nagin. Within a racialized context many observers thought the contest would come down to who would win the largest percentage of the crossover vote, but in the runoff both candidate, received roughly 20 percent from crossover voters. The key to Nagin’s victory was the overwhelming support among African Americans. The mayor received near unanimous support from local and national black leaders and organizations. More importantly, he was able to increase voter turnout among blacks, whose turnout increased from 53 percent in the primary to 55 percent in the runoff. Looking at the election returns (Appendix B), Nagin won virtually all precincts where blacks constituted well over 80 percent of the population; conversely, Landrieu won nearly all precincts where whites represented over 80 percent of the population. In wards Four and Five, which represent the Lakeview/City Park area, Landrieu led Nagin by a ratio of almost 3 to 1 (3,876 versus 1,365 in the Fourth Ward, for example). In the influential Uptown/Audubon Park area (the Fourteenth Ward) Landrieu had his highest turnout of any wards with 5,246 versus Nagin’s 1,733. When one looks at the areas with a large number of blacks, a similar trend emerges. In the now-infamous Ninth Ward, Nagin received 13,972 votes compared with Landrieu’s 6,163, while he also won a solid majority in the Seventh Ward (5,230 versus 3,442). The white vote that gave Nagin his victory in 2002 was almost completely against him in 2006. For example, in two areas that have a high concentration of wealthy whites, the Fourth and Fourteenth Wards, in 2002 Nagin won by a ratio of almost four to one (11,371 compared to Pennington’s 3107). In the 2006 election his opponent won those areas by almost a three-to-one ratio (9,122 versus 3,098 for Nagin). Overall, African Americans were able to reelect Nagin in one of closest elections in the city’s history with Nagin, receiving 52 percent of the vote versus Landrieu’s 48 percent. I know of

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no other contemporary politician who has been able to switch bases and still win reelection. For their strategic insight the Nagin camp must be applauded, but for one to view this election as simply about Ray Nagin would be thoroughly shortsighted. When election night came, my mother asked me who I thought would win (I’m the political scientist, right?), and I said Landrieu. If the demographics the media were reporting of a new white majority were right, I didn’t see any way Nagin could win. She seemed down when I said that, in an “oh, well” kind of way. When she found out Nagin won the following morning, she was visibly happy. “Yeah, I voted for him,” she hastily admitted. This was the same person that “couldn’t stand him” six months ago. She was by no means a Nagin convert, but she did recognize (as most other blacks from New Orleans) the significance of this election. One could argue that African Americans were making a statement: they were not about to let whites take over the city. Scholars of local politics acknowledge the limited power that most mayors have in implementing policy without the support of the federal government and local business communities. Moreover, contemporary mayors rarely favor any type of progressive or redistributive policies that favor minorities or lowincome groups. Most are forced to adopt a pro-growth or caretaker posture if they wish to achieve anything. After nearly three decades of black mayors, there has been very little improvement in the city, and most blacks are well aware of this. However, on a symbolic level, blacks were not ready to concede City Hall to a white mayor. In an environment devoid of post-Katrina racial polarization, this may have been possible. But the political context of Katrina created a nonphysical conflictual environment between blacks and whites over the future of New Orleans, and in such an environment racial symbolism can be very powerful. Nagin deserves credit for skillfully manipulating the context, but the true victors (at least symbolically) were the black voters of New Orleans.

(DYSFUNCTIONAL) REGIME POLITICS: A NEW ORLEANS STORY From the dirty dirty, ya heard me, u either shoot or get shot From where the unemployment line be as long as your block. . . —New Orleans hip-hop artist Juvenile, “NOLA Clap”31

To only focus on the electoral aspects of New Orleans would be terribly shortsighted. A critical problem in black politics is that African Americans frequently evaluate minority candidates employing only descriptive and symbolic considerations, whereas substantive evaluations often elude the evaluation process.32 Instead of this process, Manning Marable suggests, “accountability must be measured objectively according to a list of priorities, and not determined by political rhetoric at election time.”33 Despite any momentary euphoria caused by Nagin’s successful reelection, the most substantial problems that confront New Orleans were present prior to Katrina’s devastation. New Orleans native and political theorist Adolph Reed Jr.

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asserted shortly after the storm, “What happened in New Orleans is the culmination of twenty-five years of disparagement of any idea of public responsibility.”34 The lyrics quoted above were released in 2004, and they reflect (although somewhat exaggerated) the problems of high poverty and crime that gripped New Orleans. The city has been plagued by a number of problems that reflect mismanagement or failed policy in key economic and educational areas. Public schools in the city have been deteriorating since the early 1980s, while there are only two “Fortune 500” companies in the metropolitan area. As a result of the city’s underperformance, it has witnessed one of the highest population declines of a mid-sized city in the region (-3.2 percent) between 2000 and 2003.35 With the exception of the tourist industry, the city had been steadily declining economically for the past twenty-five years. This decline can be attributed (locally) to two primary reasons: a dysfunctional regime and a one-dimensional focus on tourism. Elite greed and corruption has lead to a dysfunctional regime that lacks the ability to attract or develop corporate interest locally, while the main source of revenue—tourism—has not been connected with any developmental projects for the general population. Before examining these underlying factors that plague the city, however, it is first important to have baseline understanding of the city’s economic performance. POLITICAL ECONOMY

IN

BRIEF

When one looks at various economic indices in New Orleans, the picture of a struggling economy emerges. The decline is more apparent when the city is compared with other cities in the South. The median income in New Orleans is $27,133, more than seven thousand less than Houston ($36,616) and Atlanta ($34,770), and only slightly more than Birmingham ($26,735). Poverty and underemployment are also major issues in the city, as nearly 30 percent of individuals make less than $15,000 a year, while another 15 percent of the population makes less than $25,000 a year. When compared to the regional jewels of Houston and Atlanta, New Orleans lags significantly behind. In terms of low-income households, New Orleans has a larger percentage than Atlanta and Houston at 36.3 percent, that is more than 10 percent higher than Houston (which does have a significantly larger population) and higher than Birmingham, which has a smaller population. A similar gap emerges when comparing high-income groups, with only 12 percent of households in the high income group in New Orleans, compared with 20.9 percent in Atlanta and 17.1 percent in Houston. Income inequality is only one part of the equation in examining New Orleans’s economic woes; the composition of industry is another major problem. Cities like Atlanta and Houston have a major corporate presence; this is the true engine of economic growth, not tourism. New Orleans only has two Fortune 500 companies, while Atlanta has seventeen, and Houston has twenty-two. I have lived in both New Orleans and Atlanta, and the numbers fail to capture the huge discrepancy between the two cities in terms of economic development. When I moved to Atlanta in the late 1990s, I was struck by the level of development and economic growth. Driving around the perimeter (I-285), one witnesses regional or home offices for nearly every

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major corporation in the country; large cranes and construction are part of daily life in both the central city and the suburbs. Atlanta’s economic boom has led to a dramatic increase in its population. One indicator of this growth is building permits. Although Atlanta is generally viewed as much larger than New Orleans, much of its population resides in suburban areas. In 2003 the population of the city of Atlanta was 419,729, while the total population of the metropolitan area was 4,529,371. Conversely, the population of the city of New Orleans is 467,934, while the total metropolitan area is 1,336,348. Keeping these demographics in mind, the gaps between the two cities in terms of housing growth is substantial. In 1980, New Orleans issued 2,047 housing building permits compared with Atlanta at 1,285. By the mid 1980s this had reversed, with the number of new building permits significantly dropping in New Orleans while there was a steady increase in Atlanta. Housing growth peaked in New Orleans in 1983 when 3,199 new permits were issued (1,103 in Atlanta); after that the city began a steady decline. In 1986 there were 2,346 building permits issued in Atlanta with only 637 issued in New Orleans. The recession that affected the national economy in the late 1980s and early 1990s had a predicable impact on housing growth in both cities, but by 1993 Atlanta was well on its way to a recovery while New Orleans would struggle until 1996 before it returned to pre-1987 levels. The mean number of housing permits over this twentyfour year period is 2,534 for Atlanta and 893 for New Orleans. In the last year for which data was available (2003), there were 917 permits issued in New Orleans, compared with 6,893 in Atlanta. Within this time period New Orleans has yet to issue more than 1,000 permits in one year and falls well short of the 1983 total of 3,199. In nearly every major category of social and economic development the city of New Orleans falls well behind its regional neighbors. Some of New Orleans’s economic problems, though, can be partially attributed to the general decline in federal support to cities that occurred after the 1970s. Under the heading of “New Federalism,” presidents since the 1970s have significantly reduced federal aid to cities.36 Republican occupancy of the oval office has led to two policy patterns that have significantly reduced the amount of revenues distributed to local governments. First, the Republican belief that the private sector is a better source for economic development and growth than are federally funded programs has had a significant impact on urban development. Beginning with Reagan and continuing to the second President Bush, lawmakers have championed the virtues of market-based growth. “The Reagan Administration,” Judd and Swanstrom note, “set about sharply reducing federal urban aid proclaiming that ‘the private market is more efficient than federal program administrators in allocating dollars.’”37 This was also related to the second policy shift of devolution, “a strategy in which the national government would grant more authority over a range of policies currently under national government authority,” although in many instances the states bore a substantial portion of the cost of these programs.38 The move from a centralized to decentralized view of the government on the part of Republican presidents has lead to an environment in which state and local governments have more authority but a decline in intergovernmental grants. As a result of this policy shift, between 1980 and 1990 there was a 46 percent net reduction in federal grants to city governments.39 When the federal government does provide grants, Rich asserts, “the vast

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majority of federal urban assistance today is not being administered by city governments or local agencies aligned with City Hall.”40 To solely locate New Orleans’s economic struggles within an intergovernmental context, however, would be to overlook the gains that other cities have made since the early 1980s. As the previous data has indicated, places like Atlanta and Houston continued to exhibit strong economic performance in the same environment that New Orleans struggled with. Therefore, to understand the source of the city’s troubles it is necessary to examine the performance of the local regime. REGIME POLITICS

Scholars of local politics often use the term urban regime to refer to the interaction of political and business interests that facilitate the growth and development of cities. At the core of this relationship are elected officials who are responsible for steering institutional mechanisms and business actors who command large amounts of financial capital. According to Stone, an urban regime refers to the “informal arrangements by which public bodies and private interest function together in order to be able to make and carry out governing decisions.”41 While civic associations (such as community groups) may sometimes enter into the equation, the central area of concern is the interaction between business and government officials. The end of big government, exemplified in the Great Society programs of the 1960s and 1970s, led to an increasing strain on municipal governments, thereby making the support of private business critical in the vitality of modern cities. Conversely, despite the large amounts of capital that financial elites can throw around, they are still dependent on elected officials for navigating institutional regulations (property taxes, land grants, public works, et cetera). Some scholars have noted that urban regime theory, as articulated by Stone and others, fails to account for macroeconomic shifts that oftentimes constrain the activities of local government.42 Another important criticism of urban regime theory is the failure to account for racial and ethnic dynamics in some cases.43 In terms of an urban regime with a black majority, Reed notes that the combination of macro political-economic pressures and the intra-group hegemony of the black middle and upper class has produced a generation of black mayors who proclaim a progressive agenda while maintaining an unwavering commitment to pro-growth strategies. He asserts that “the new regime of race relations. . .has exerted a demobilization effect on black politics precisely by virtue of its capacities for delivering benefits and, perhaps more important, defining what benefits political action can be legitimately be used to pursue.”44 The main factor that Reed and others point to is not anti-communal policy, but it is the ability of BEOs to frame their public discourse to shape the public’s perception that “downtown development” strategies are good for lowerclass blacks. Employment promises (as a byproduct of these development projects), combined with selective administrative appointments, have allowed many BEOs to give the impression that they were involved in policy promulgation and implementation that would aid the majority of the population, when in fact only elites receive any substantial returns from these directives.45 When one looks at the actions of the

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urban regime in New Orleans, this pattern is clearly evident. Unlike the elites in municipalities like Atlanta, New Orleans elites cannot claim aggregate economic growth. The following section highlights some of the characteristics of this dysfunctional regime. Outside of tourism, New Orleans generates the bulk of its revenues from small businesses and the health industry. This is not to say there have not been opportunities for corporate development; rather, the other key issues—corruption and greed—have served to alienate potential investors. For example, high levels of corruption have existed since the days of Governor Huey Long, and they were exemplified in the conviction of former Governor Edwin Edwards. Mardi Gras is another example: for all the fanfare it receives nationally, few outsiders recognize that on certain levels it is an elite ritual; many of the largest parades, like Bacchus and Endymion, are sponsored by private social organizations whose members (nearly all white) are composed of some of the wealthiest people in the city. In an earlier study, Schexnider noted that “wealth and power in New Orleans are concentrated in a small but powerful oligarchy that unduly influences the direction of economic development and public policy.”46 Citing from a study by James Bobo, he continues, “Significantly, there is a small but powerful, highly structured upper class and the middle income class is much smaller in metropolitan New Orleans, compared to all SMSA’s [standard metropolitan statistical areas], Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. In few, if any, major metropolitan areas is income so inequitably distributed. And an inequitable income distribution is in part self-perpetuating.”47 Contemporary talks of reform often overlook the influence of this group, but as one writer noted prior to Mayor Nagin’s first term, these individuals share an equal responsibility for the city’s decline over the past fifty years: “No one denies that corrupt politics has held Louisiana back, yet for all their protestations about reform, many members of the business community have formed a co-dependent relationship with the very people they publicly revile.”48 Some observers have characterized the economic plans of the city as “ad hoc” or “surprise” planning. One columnist in the Times-Picayune has noted, “New Orleans lurches forward in an unplanned, ad hoc manner with private-sector development gathering support and public works receiving approval largely based on what interest group, developer or politician influences the planning process at a particular time. While more progressive cities in this country have master plans, New Orleans has what I like to call ‘planning by surprise.’ You wake up in the morning, you read The Times-Picayune, you see what the plan is.”49 Some may contend that these backroom deals are a normal part of politics. Peterson, for example, contends that “issues of patronage and corruption dominate local politics not because local officials are particularly venal or devious, but because employment issues are one of the limited set of matters readily resolved at the local level.”50 Despite the commonality of this practice, nevertheless, in New Orleans allocational policies are so exaggerated that competence, economic growth, and the general impact on the city are completely overlooked in exchange for political connections. One example of this involved the management of Louis Armstrong Airport during Marc Morial’s second term. Although it is located in Jefferson Parish, the airport is governed by New Orleans officials, and every five years a contract

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worth approximately $20 million is awarded to a firm to manage the facilities. In a story published by the Louisiana Weekly, it was reported that Mayor Morial was attempting to bypass the committee setup to evaluate candidates and select a personal ally. It noted: Bob Tucker, friend of New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, has endeavored to win the $20,000,000 management contract at the Airport for some time. Of the original six applicants for the private operations contract, only Tucker’s AMC and Parson’s Aviation remain. A private poll of the Aviation Board allegedly reveals that the majority of the members want Parson’s, an international firm that operates airports all over the world, to get the contract. The members were reportedly impressed by Parson’s experience and expertise. However, sources reveal to The Louisiana Weekly that “friends of Tucker and Morial” have blocked Parson’s bid.51

These types of occurrences were so commonplace that they rarely attracted public attention; allocational corruption was viewed almost as a part of the city’s political culture. Reed notes that one of the main characteristics of urban regimes with black majorities is the ability of black elites to mold the public’s expectations of success and failure. Like other mayors in the past, Marc Morial was able to shape public perception of his performance in a positive light largely due to reductions in crime and new tourism projects. Howell and McLean report that Morial enjoyed a 90 and 91 percent approval rating among blacks in 1996 and 1998, respectively, with a 59 percent approval rating among whites.52 In addition to improvements in law enforcement, Morial was able to point to a number of large projects under his watch, including an expansion of the Ernest “Dutch” Morial Convention Center, the construction of an amusement park—JazzLand—in New Orleans East, and the construction of a new sports arena built to attract an National Basketball Association (NBA) franchise. Among blacks and whites these efforts led to positive evaluations, yet, as the data in the previous section reveals, New Orleans lagged significantly behind places like Houston and Atlanta in median income and income distribution among the population during his administration. The regime’s emphasis on insider politics, without any efforts to expand the city’s middle class, led to a situation of incremental economic growth exaggerated under the pretext of tourist events and downtown building projects. TOURISM

IN THE

BIG EASY

New Orleans was the place everyone liked to go see, visit, and party. A place that people from other places wanted to go to act silly, it was viewed largely as a party town. It had good food, good music, and relaxed laws when it came to social pleasures. This is a key part of the problem. Because New Orleans combines a rich artistic history with an open tolerance for various types of human behavior viewed much more negatively in other areas of the country, its economy has largely been built around tourism. Tourism contributes $5–8 billion to the city and state economies annually, as well as 30 percent of its tax revenue.53 In addition to its natural endowment of fine

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food and music, the city and state have built an infrastructure aimed at harnessing the tourist industry. The Superdome and Convention Center were built to draw large sporting events (the Sugar Bowl, the Super Bowl, the Bayou Classic, and the Essence Festival) and various conventions and conferences. The problem is not that tourism serves no benefit to the local economies, but rather the nature of that benefit. New Orleans has long been a top (adult) entertainment destination, not only for native events such as Mardi Gras or the Jazz & Heritage Festival, but also for sports. Prior to conflicts between the state and Saints owner Tom Benson, the city had hosted the most Super Bowls, along with Miami and Los Anteles (it is also home for the college Sugar Bowl). Over the past twenty years nearly all major development projects have centered on tourism. The state has financed the building of the Morial Convention Center (with subsequent expansions) and the New Orleans Arena (in order to attract an NBA team). Like other cities, the “downtown” area has also been subject of investments such as the Riverwalk, Jax Brewery, and the Aquarium of the Americas. Many of the earlier downtown projects were an outgrowth the World’s Fair, which the city hosted in 1984. The state and city benefit heavily from these venues and events. As noted earlier, the city and state received more than $5 billion from tourism in 2004. The issue is linkage: does an economy centered on tourism benefit the general population? Building a new sports arena or aquarium cost hundreds of millions of dollars, finances that could greatly benefit a public school system that has been struggling for decades. Politicians often speak about the benefits of these projects to the city and state, but after years of investment there has been virtually no improvement in the city’s other areas. The reality, as Eisinger notes, is that “the amount of fiscal and political resources and the level of energy that local elites must devote to the revitalization of large entertainment projects are so great that more mundane urban problems and needs must often be subordinated or ignored.”54 Several studies have noted that cities that engage in these gathering industries rarely see the returns they predicted from these investments, or the revenues received are not funneled towards more pressing needs. Moreover, as Judd and Swanstrom indicate, “the downtown corporate economy has few links with small business and job creation in neighborhoods. Central city residents often lack the skills and education to qualify for the knowledge-intensive jobs that locate in central business districts. . . .Many of the jobs in the tourist industry that do go to central city dwellers are unpleasant, low-skilled jobs, with little or no prospects for advancement.”55 Although the tourist industry can generate significant revenues for the city and state, it does not develop the type of corporate infrastructure that defines the country’s big cites. It has failed to attract industry like Atlanta, lacks the financial and industrial legacies of New York and Chicago, and, more importantly, it has failed to capitalize on its comparative advantage in the petroleum industry (due to its close location to the Gulf of Mexico), losing out to Houston. This is not to suggest that these cities have linked these industries to progressive or redistributive policy agendas, as these areas have also neglected their lower-income populations.56 These industries, however, do lead to aggregate city growth, whether it be in finance, technology, or manufacturing. The only people I ever hear mentioning that they want to move to New Orleans are artists or musicians; everyone else would mention it as a

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place they would like to go and party. “The Big Easy” may be a nice name for a movie or a song, but in terms of politics and economics, it symbolizes that the city is a joke. Houston, Chicago, or Atlanta—you go to these places to do business; people go to New Orleans to get drunk. Sometimes I wonder who is more intoxicated— the visitors or the local elites who celebrate these excesses as an accomplishment.

CONCLUSION: NEW ORLEANS—THE CITY

THAT

CARE FORGOT

There is a lot unknown in terms of the rebuilding process and the future of New Orleans. The city is incrementally struggling to get back on its feet. When I ask friends about their future plans, I get mixed responses. A longtime friend who lived in one of the few areas that had minimal damage (the West Bank) is planning on moving his family to Atlanta. Both he and his wife worked for the public school system prior to the storm, but since the hurricane an already deplorable school system is currently in shambles as the state seeks to reorganize it. My friend lost his job, while his wife was offered another position with the school board at the “very competitive” salary of $28,000. This is a typical middle-class family like those most cities seek to attract, yet New Orleans is driving these residents away. Unlike my friends who are younger and more mobile, my immediate family wishes to return home. “After the hurricane season” is the familiar response I hear from them, as no one wants to deals with the anxiety of being in the city if a hurricane enters the Gulf. This is the unknown part of the equation, but as the example of my friend illustrates, much of the city’s future is dependent on the plans and policies that will be implemented in the near future. More than a year after Katrina, politicians at the local and state level continue to move at a snail’s pace. There are at least four different commissions appointed by the governor, the mayor, and City Council that are charged with articulating policy options. Each plan has a different vision of the city’s future. One major issue is whether the city should focus its resources on the rebuilding process. Outside planners have favored the areas that suffered the least amount of damage, those at higher elevations. However, these areas are disproportionately inhabited by whites. After winning an election through strong African American support, the mayor would be committing political suicide to condemn large parts of the city. At the state level, the governor has been slow to distribute funds to individuals, particularly the Road Home Grants. Needless to say, the frictions that existed between Blanco and Nagin before the storm continue to be an issue. Yet within this political stalemate, the people of New Orleans continue to suffer. Visiting there in August 2006, I was struck by this weird combination of despair and hope. The bulk of the city still looks like a ghost town, but there are pockets where the spirit of New Orleans is alive and well. But the question remains: Will New Orleans ever be the same?

NOTES 1. Lil’ Wayne, “George Bush,” DJ Drama and Lil’ Wayne Mixtape (Sum. 2006). 2. Consider the following: Michael Parenti, “How the Free Market Killed New Orleans,” The Humanist (November/December 2005): 16–18; Saladin Muhammad, “Hurricane

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Katrina: The Black Nation’s 9/11! A Strategic Perspective for Self-Determination,” Socialism and Democracy 20 (July 2006): 3–17; Henry Giroux, “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability,” College Literature 33 (Summer 2006): 171–96; and David Troutt, After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina (New York: New Press, 2006). Several scholars have used terms like “hidden transcripts” and “standpoint epistemologies” to highlight the difference between public (superordinate) and private (subaltern) discourses. These authors note the importance of examining personal narratives and cultural production as a means of countering the dominant discourse, and understanding the resistance practices of the oppressed. My usage of the concept focuses mainly on tapping into perspectives that may have been overlooked in the dominant discourse on Hurricane Katrina. See Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Manning Marable, Living Black History: How Reimaging the AfricanAmerican Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Robin Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader, ed. P. Williams and L. Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Bat-Ami Bar On, “Marginality and Epistemic Privilege,” in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. L. Alcoff and E. Potter (New York: Routledge, 1993); and John Michael, “Making a Stand: Standpoint Epistemologies, Political Positions, Proposition 187,” Telos, no. 108 (Summer 1996): 93–103. See Arnold Hirsch, “Harold and Dutch Revisited: A Comparative Look at the First Black Mayors of Chicago and New Orleans,” in African-American Mayors: Race, Politics, and the American City, ed. D. Colburn and J. Adler (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 109–10; also consider Gwendolyn Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992). Georgia Persons, “Black Mayoralties and the New Black Politics: From Insurgency to Racial Reconciliation,” in Dilemmas of Black Politics: Issues of Leadership and Strategy, ed. G. Persons (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 46. Ronald Walters, “Two Political Traditions: Black Politics in the 1990s,” National Political Science Review 3 (1990): 199. Ibid. Joseph McCormick II and Charles Jones, “The Conceptualization of Deracialization: Thinking Through the Dilemma,” in Dilemmas of Black Politics: Issues of Leadership and Strategy, 76. Additional discussions of this concept can also be found in Huey Perry, introduction to Race, Politics, and Governance in the United States, ed. Huey Perry (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996); and Roger Oden, “The Election of Carol Mosley-Braun in Illinois,” in Race, Politics, and Governance. Another type of deracialized campaign occurs when African Americans are running against whites in cities or districts where whites constitute the majority. In these situations the African-American candidates make strong appeals to white voters and “usually do not make strong racial appeals in their campaigns. This is the essence of a deracialized campaign.” Examples of this type of deracialized campaign include the election of Douglas Wilder as governor of Virginia and David Dinkins as Mayor of New York. See Perry, introduction to Race, Politics, and Governance, 5. Roy Rodney, cited in “Nagin Counts on Compromise, Integrity,” New Orleans TimesPicayune, January 12, 2002, p. 1.

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11. There are a number of PACs (political action committees) that have been operating in New Orleans since the mid 1960s. The Community Organization for Urban Politics (COUP) was associated with Seventh Ward conservative Creoles, and key leaders have included the city’s second African-American mayor, Sidney Barthelemy. The Southern Organization for Unified Leadership (SOUL) was an outgrowth of the activities of the Congress Of Racial Equality in New Orleans and was initially associated with the emerging black consciousness of the 1960s. The Black Organization for Leadership Development (BOLD) emerged out of an association of uptown blacks affiliated with former mayor Moon Landrieu. The Louisiana Independent Federation of Electors (LIFE) is an organization of former Mayor Marc Morial and his supporters, while the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is a group formed in 1990s by a number of community activists. For discussions of SOUL, COUP, and BOLD, see Arnold Hirsch, “Simply a Matter of Black and White: The Transformation of Race and Politics in Twentieth-Century New Orleans,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. A. Hirsch and J. Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992). 12. “Nagin Counts on Compromise, Integrity,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 12, 2002, p. 1. 13. Editorial, “Ray Nagin for Mayor,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 17, 2002, p. 6. 14. William Sites, “The Limits of Urban Regime Theory: New York City Under Koch, Dinkins, and Giuliani,” in The Politics of Urban America: A Reader, ed. D. Judd and P. Kantor (New York: Longman, 2002), 215. 15. Ibid. 16. See Frank Donze, “7 Mayoral Rivals Stick to Their Scripts in Debate,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 31, 2002. 17. Stephanie Grace, “Nagin Shoots Up, Irons Loses Steam in Newest Poll,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 23, 2002, p. 1. 18. The slide of Irons in relationship to Nagin is important for one reason: she was the candidate receiving the most support from whites in the beginning of the mayoral campaign. She was subject to a number of allegations; among the more notable accusations were that she was employed in two different state government positions (Dual Office Holding Law) and that she had claimed that her brother had been innocently shot years ago when in fact he had been shot by the police after robbing a store. See Christopher Tidmore, “Inside Political Track,” Louisiana Weekly January 14, 2002; idem., January 21, 2002; “Integrity Questions Are Mounting for Mayoral Candidate: Ad, Job Inquiries Hit Irons Campaign,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 12, 2002, p. 1; “Mayoral Attack Hits the Airwaves,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 19, 2002. 19. See Christopher Tidmore, “Mayor’s Race Heats Up as Nagin Gets Backers,” Louisiana Weekly, February 11, 2002, p. 1; Frank Donze and Stephanie Grace, “ACORN Plants Its Support in Pennington,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, February 22, 2002, p. 1. 20. Although there is housing segregation in New Orleans, the city is not rigidly segregated in a spatial sense. The average distance that separates a white neighborhood from a black neighborhood is often only a few blocks. For example, the wealthiest part of the city, the St. Charles Audubon Park area, is thoroughly integrated, with many lower-income and high-crime neighborhoods. 21. C. Ray Nagin, “New Orleans Is on the Move Again: New Orleans’ Mayor C. Ray Nagin Inaugural Address,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 7, 2002, p. 6. 22. Juvenile, “Get Ya Hustle On,” Reality Check (Atlantic Records, March 2006). 23. Hanes Walton, African American Power and Politics: The Political Context Variable (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 7. Also see idem,”The Nature of Black

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25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

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Politics and Black Political Behavior,” in Black Politics and Black Political Behavior, ed. Hanes Walton (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994); and idem., Black Politics: A Theoretical and Structural Analysis (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972). Karen Kaufmann, Group Conflict & Mayoral Voting Behavior in American Cties (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 5. Additional discussion of racial models employed by voting and attitudinal analysts can be found in Katherine Tate, From Protest To Politics (New York: Russell Sage Foundation/Harvard University Press, 1993); Michael Dawson, Behind The Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Dianne Pinderhughes, Race and Ethnicity in Chicago Politics: A Reexamination of Pluralist Theory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Cathy Cohen and Michael Dawson, “Neighborhood Poverty and African American Politics,” American Political Science Review 87 (June 1993): 286–302; and Richard Allen, Michael Dawson, and Ron Brown, “A Schema-Based Approach to Modeling an African-American Racial Belief System,” American Political Science Review 83 (June 1989): 421–41 The specific question was, “Do you approve of the job–person– in responding to the effects of Hurricane Katrina?” Gallup Poll conducted February 18–26, 2006. Gallup Poll conducted February 18–26, 2006. Mos Def, “Katrina Remix,” Underground (net) Release (Approx. Sept. 2005). Todd Purdam et al., “Support for Bush Continues to Drop as More Question His Leadership Skills, Poll Shows,” The New York Times, September 15, 2005. Mayor Nagin, cited in John Pope, “Evoking King, Nagin Calls N.O. ‘Chocolate City,’ Speech Addresses Fears of Losing Black Culture,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 17, 2006, p. 1. See George Curry, “Political Cross-dressing in New Orleans,” Louisiana Weekly, May 29, 2006. UTP, “Nolia Clap,” NOLA CLAP (2004). The terms descriptive, symbolic, and substantive, as modifiers of representation, are often used by congressional scholars as an analytical tool to evaluate the representativeness of elected officials to their constituents. “Descriptive representation,” according to Walton and Smith, “is the extent to which the legislature looks like the people in a demographic sense. Symbolic representation concerns the extent to which people have confidence or trust in the legislature, and substantive representation asks whether the laws passed by the legislature correspond to the policy interests or preferences of the people.” See Hanes Walton and Robert Smith, American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom (New York: Longman, 2000), 178; Katherine Tate, Black Faces in the Mirror: African Americans and Their Representatives in the U.S. Congress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 13. Manning Marable, “Violence, Resistance, and the Struggle for Black Empowerment,” in Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Resistance, and Radicalism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 132. Aldoph Reed, Jr.,“Classifying the Hurricane,” The Nation, October 3, 2005, online edition. U.S. Census Bureau. For discussions of the contemporary federalism see: Paul Peterson, “From the Price of Federalism,” in The Enduring Debate: Classic and Contemporary Readings in American Politics, ed. D. Canon, J. Coleman, and K. Mayer (New York: Norton, 2006); Craig Volden, “The Politics of Competitive Federalism: A Race to the Bottom in Welfare Benefits,” American Journal of Political Science 46 (April 2002): 352–63. Dennis Judd and Todd Swanstrom, City Politics: Private Power and Public Policy (New York: Longman, 1998), 236.

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38. Theodore Lowi, Benjamin Ginsberg, and Kenneth Shepsle, American Government: Freedom and Power ( New York: Norton, 2006), 65. 39. Judd and Swanstron, City Politics, 239. 40. Michael Rich, “The Intergovernmental Environment,” Cities, Politics, and Policy: A Comparative Analysis, ed. J. Pelissero (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2003), 48. 41. Clarence Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta: 1946–1988 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 6. Also consider Russell Murphy, “Politics, Political Science, and Urban Governance: A Literature and a Legacy,” Annual Review of Political Science (2002): 63–85. 42. Regarding this omission, Davies contends that “the heart of the problem is the limited theorizing of the way economic forces affect local political institutions and the balance of power within them. It is not enough to acknowledge the influence of the market economy on local political processes, it is also necessary to explain how fluctuations in the economy enable and constrain political options.” Most regime theorists reject the type of economic determinism associated with Marxism; however, critics maintain that these proponents have failed to account for market forces at macro level and their potentially constraining effects on municipal governance. The recessions of the 1980s, combined with a federal government determined to reduce the amount of funding at the local level, clearly had an impact on the ability of mayors to govern. The key issue, these authors raise, is to what degree these macro processes influence or limit decision making on the local level. These pro-growth market strategies also contradict any efforts toward egalitarian social-communal development. Imbroscio characterizing Paul Peterson’s analysis of local politics, says, “He argued that the mobility of economic resources (resulting from the nature of capitalism), combined with the intergovernmental (subnational) competition for investment (resulting from the nature of federalism) left American cities constrained by economic pressures. These constraints limited the range of political choice. Cities were compelled, by necessity, to pursue developmental policies (that enhance the economic position of the city) while eschewing policies to redistribute wealth (that harm this economic position).” Therefore, one witnesses both an analytical limitation that leads to an ideological contradiction on the part of regime theorists. See Jonathan Davies, “Urban Regime Theory: A NormativeEmpirical Critique,” Journal of Urban Affairs 24, no.1 (2002): 13; David Imbroscio, “Overcoming the Neglect of Economics in Urban Regime Theory,” Journal of Urban Affairs 25, no. 3 (2003): 272. 43. The issue is not the assignment of racial categories to key actors, but the failure to examine how race sometimes serves as a structuring principle, that can lead institutional biases. These institutional biases play themselves out in a class-based analysis that overlooks intragroup activities outside the systemic context. See Cynthia Horan, “Racializing Regime Politics,” Journal of Urban Affairs 24, no 1 (2002): 25. 44. Adolph Reed Jr., “Sources of Demobilization in the New Black Political Regime: Incorporation, Ideological Capitulation, and Radical Failure in the Post-Segregation Era,” in Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 121. 45. A key consideration from Reed’s perspective is the tactical ability of BEOs in relationship to their constituents. He notes that “Jackson’s success at reinvention suggest one mechanism through which the black administration can mediate the tension between electoral and governing constituencies. By virtue of his representation of his position as the ‘black’ position, he added an epicycle of racial self-defense to blacks’ consideration of policy options; to that extent, Jackson shifted the basis for black policy debate away from substantive concern with the potential outcomes and toward protection of

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47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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55. 56.

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the racial image and status, as embodied in the idiosyncratic agenda of the black official. In this way it becomes possible for black officials to maintain support from their black constituents and the development elites that systematically disadvantage them.” Ibid., 177. Alvin Schexnider, “Political Mobilization in the South: The Election of a Black Mayor in New Orleans,” in The New Black Politics: The Search for Political Power, ed. M. Preston et al. (New York: Longman, 1982), 223. Also consider Huey Perry, “Black Political and Mayoral Leadership in Birmingham and New Orleans,” National Political Science Review 2 (1990): 154–61. Schexnider, “Political Mobilization,” 223. Christopher Tidmore, “It’s Not Just the Politicians’ Fault,” Louisiana Weekly, February 25, 2002. William Borah, “City Must Have a Real Master Plan,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 21, 1998. Paul Peterson, City Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 154. Christopher Tidmore, “Inside Political Track,” Louisiana Weekly, January 21, 2002. Susan Howell and William McClean, “Performance and Race in Evaluating Minority Mayors,” Public Opinion Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2001): 327–33. See Bringing New Orleans Back Commission (BNOBC), “Post-Katrina Economic Redevelopment Plan,” Version 4.1, January 2006; BNOBC, “Rebuilding New Orleans,” January 2006. Peter Eisinger, “The Politics of Bread and Circuses: Building the City for the Visitor Class,” in The Politics of Urban America: A Reader, 257. Also see John Kasarda, “Urban Change and Minority Opportunities,” in The New Urban Reality, ed. P. Peterson (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1985). Dennis Judd and Todd Swanstrom, City Politics: Private Power and Public Policy (New York: Longman, 1998), 368. While Atlanta, for example, has been a model city in terms of rapid political-economic growth, this is not to suggest that low income and minority groups’ relative socio-economic position has improved. For discussions of this contradictory performance see Manley Banks, “A Changing Electorate in a Majority Black City: The Emergence of a Neo-Conservative Black Urban Regime in Contemporary Atlanta,” Journal of Urban Affairs 22, no. 3 (265–78); Rob Gurwitt, “How to Win Friends and Repair a City,” in State and Local Government 2005–2006, ed. K. Smith (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006), 173–77; Mack Jones, “Black Mayoral Leadership in Atlanta: A Comment,” National Political Science Review 2 (1990): 138–44; Reed, “A Critique of Neoprogressivism in Theorizing about Local Development Policy: A Case from Atlanta,” in Stirrings in the Jug; and Stone, Regime Politics.

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HURRICANE KATRINA AS AN ELABORATION ON AN ONGOING THEME: RACIALIZED SPACES IN LOUISIANA* K. ANIMASHAUN DUCRE

INTRODUCTION A search of the WORLDCAT database yielded 786 sources related to Hurricane Katrina in summer 2006.1 Over half of the sources cited in WORLDCAT are books (419) related to the impacts of the disaster, as well as rebuilding the city of New Orleans and the Gulf. The wealth of opinion and intellectual work on Katrina reveals a particular assumption about the storm. The common sentiment is that Hurricane Katrina was an extraordinary event. While it is not my intent to belittle the significant pain and suffering of Katrina victims and their families, I contend that Katrina does not mark a significant departure, as many have suggested. Rather, Hurricane Katrina should be examined as an eloboration on an ongoing theme, another significant note in the sordid history of American racism. In fact, the state of Louisiana emerges as an important site for chronicling America’s race relations, beginning in 1865 with the Louisiana Black Code, the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, the rise of the oil and gas industry in Louisiana, and the treatment of African Americans during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Given this chronology of events and against

*Direct correspondence to: K. Animashaun Ducre, Department of African American Studies, Syracuse University, 200 Sims Hall, Syracuse, New York 13244.

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this historical backdrop, the chaos that ensued in Katrina’s aftermath is unremarkable. Furthermore, placing the history of Louisiana within this historical context can explain why many in the Gulf Coast continue to suffer until this day.

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There was little question that Katrina had sparked renewed debate about race, class, and institutional approaches towards vulnerable population groups in the US. . . .Whether or not one believed racist charges were well-founded (and clearly a majority of our members did not) the Select Committee agreed it should recognize and discuss the socioeconomic and racial backdrop against which Katrina unfolded.2

This statement, issued by the Congressional Select Committee, reflects the persistent amnesia regarding racism in the United States. In their 500-plus–page report, race is only mentioned briefly. Unlike Congress, many see race as an important dimension in understanding Katrina. The concept of racialized spaces is a useful framework to support the idea of Hurricane Katrina as a postscript. This concept evolved prior to Katrina as a possible explanation for the emergence of environmental racism and injustice. While not a native Louisianan, I had spent most of my adult life in and around the state, first as an undergraduate at Tulane University and later as a community organizer in the environmental justice movement until the late 1990s. Louisiana’s culture seems distinct to me. I figured that there must be something unique about its history that facilitated contemporary examples of racism and injustice. For example, I was a student when David Duke ran his campaign for governor and later an unsuccessful bid for the Presidency. He only lost by a narrow margin to former Governor Edwin Edwards. I can also recall the controversial acquittal of Rodney Peairs of Baton Rouge, who shot a Japanese exchange student, Yoshihiro Hattori, on Halloween in 1992.3 I also recall the marching of the Ku Klux Klan on the town square in Homer, in northern Louisiana. Homer was also the proposed host site of a uranium enrichment facility—a proposal that was later challenged on the basis of environmental racism. In fact, one of the most decisive battles for environmental justice occurred in southeastern Louisiana in the city of Convent. There, residents launched a successful campaign against a proposed plastics complex.4 The state of Louisiana emerges as an important site for a discussion of race relations centering on race, space, and power. This intersection of race, space, and power is what I refer to as racialized spaces. The racialized spaces hypothesis is defined as “historic practice and spatial designation of a particular area for racial and ethnic minorities as a means of containment and social control. This practice serves to reinforce preconceived notions of Otherness or, result in the creation of a culturally inferior Other.”5 The key themes of this concept concern history, containment, and social control. The first element is history. History acknowledges the genealogy of patterns that push and pull the poor and people of color under racial segregation, class segregation, or both. Examples include racial violence, deed restrictions, restrictive covenants, blockbusting, redlining, slum clearance, creation of public housing, and discriminatory mortgage lending. The second element, containment, emphasizes the

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geographic isolation of Others within racialized spaces, from and by those with power. The final element is social control, which refers to the methods that maintain racialized spaces, like surveillance and institutionalization. Quite literally, social control is the element designed to keep folks in their places. All of these tenets can be applied to the historical and socio-spatial context of African American life in the state of Louisiana. Moreover, the concept of racialized spaces helps place the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina and the resulting levee failure into context. In the early 1970s, Blauner was the first academic to suggest that the severe concentration and socioeconomic disparities in black neighborhoods resulted in internal colonialism.6 The racialized spaces framework relates to the internal colonization thesis. France was the first colonial power in the area that encompasses present-day Louisiana. The first settlement started in 1699, and the importation of African slaves began as early as 1717. The largest consignment of African slaves came in June 1719, with Africans originating from Senegal-Gambia.7 By 1724, African slaves outnumbered the French colonial population, necessitating the need for stricter controls. The first sets of controls, the “Code Noir,” or Black Codes, were instituted. The codes would serve as the basis for the American institution of the Black Codes in 1865. The Louisiana Purchase was perhaps the most lucrative land deal in U.S. history. The American government paid almost four cents an acre for 900,000 square miles of territory, expanding the size of its empire by 23 percent. In 1808, federal law prohibited the importation of African slaves into the United States, but interstate slavetrafficking was alive and well. There are also numerous accounts of illegal importation of African slaves post-1808. Louisiana is admitted into the Union as the eighteenth state in 1812. By 1849, there were 1,536 plantations, producing 96 percent of the nation’s raw sugar, using the labor over 325,000 enslaved Africans.8 And like many places in the South, its landscape and economy were devastated by Civil War and Union occupation. While the plantation regime and slavery proved the cornerstone of the Gulf economy, its strength was always tested by nature. Major hurricanes hit in 1856 and 1915. Hurricane Betsy devastated the region in 1965. Major flooding occurred in 1884, 1897, 1902, 1903, 1912, 1913, 1922, 1973, 1983, and 1995. Despite these challenges, New Orleans rose to become a major port. By 1880, New Orleans was the second-largest port in the United States, falling short to New York.9 By 1995, New Orleans was ranked the world’s largest port by cargo volume. To remain competitive, New Orleans economy revolves around control and mastery of space by the exploitation of (black) labor, land, and capital. The mastery over space by land relies on the daunting task of controlling the mighty Mississippi River and its tributaries. The United States Army Corps of Engineers was created in 1802 by the federal government. Soon after its establishment, one of the key tasks of this federally funded civil engineering agency was to ensure navigability of the Mississippi River for trade. From then on, the Army Corps of Engineers began a long and complex relationship with Louisiana’s natural environment. Its central role in controlling land reflects the value of engineering and enterprise during the Progressive Era. Barry notes, “In the century of the engineers, the study of this writhing river began as a scientific enterprise. The resulting policy became a corruption of science.”10

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The mastery over space by labor centers on the role African Americans play in empire building. In applying the element of history from the racialized spaces framework, there is evidence that Louisiana initiated the formal era of racially discriminatory policies with landmark legislative initiatives like the Black Codes of 1865 and the events leading up to the Plessy decision in 1896. Louisiana is credited as the pioneer of the South’s new post–Civil War labor system, which led to the establishment of labor contracts through the Freedmen’s Bureau.11 After New Orleans fell to Union forces in 1862, a commander in the Department of the Gulf (the antecedent to the Freedmen’s Bureau) was faced with the mass exodus of former slaves from area plantations, resulting in a severe labor shortage. The solution was a contractual agreement between the government and planters, supposedly on behalf of the freedmen. These labor contracts were reminiscent of ante-bellum policies. This type of sentiment would become the basis for the Black Codes of 1865. In reaction to imminent emancipation, Louisiana, along with other Southern states, established laws, often referred to as Black Codes, to limit black mobility. The French had established Code Noir to govern the rights of slaves as early as 1724 in the Louisiana territory. Southern plantations were regarded as the priority in restoring the devastated, post-Civil War economy. While these codes guaranteed civil rights to freedmen such as the right to marry and own property, their general purpose was to ensure a supply of former slaves as workers on labor-intensive plantations. In addition to these codes, some scholars have suggested that the establishment of vagrancy and convict laws during the same era were also a means to restrict black mobility and guarantee labor.12 Vagrancy laws succeeded in compelling black workers to choose between the field or imprisonment. In Louisiana, violation of a labor contract was tantamount to a criminal act. With regards to criminality, convict laws were established to create a policy for prison labor. Under the racialized spaces hypothesis, the earlier forms of labor contracts for freedmen and the enactment of the Black Codes can be viewed as the attempt to restore the racial order of white supremacy that existed before the Civil War. Blacks were free in a very limited sense. However, blacks were not without agency. There were attempts to organize under the Knights of Labor, but their efforts were met with racial violence.13 The most significant opportunity for black advancement was in the proposal for land redistribution. In August of 1865, the assistant commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau of Louisiana announced plans for the redistribution of thousands of acres of abandoned and confiscated lands; however, President Johnson quickly nixed those plans.14 The lands were restored to their prior owners, and so the chance to establish place for black Louisianans was abandoned. While efforts to create new black spaces were thwarted, there was also political momentum to further diminish the remaining spaces where blacks could live, work, and play. This political momentum was codified into what is referred to as the “separate but equal” doctrine. While many recall and herald the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools and other facilities, the shameful decision in American history that catalyzed the institutionalization of the “separate but equal” doctrine was the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson.

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Homer A. Plessy was born in 1863 in New Orleans to parents known in French creole as gens de colour, “free people of color.” On June 7, 1892, Plessy, a shoemaker, sat in the whites-only railcar on the East Louisiana Railroad; he was arrested for violating the state law mandating separate cars for whites and blacks. His trial judge, John Ferguson, ordered him to pay fines for this violation, and the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Lawyers for Plessy argued that his arrest violated his civil rights under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Delivering the opinion, Justice Brown wrote in 1896, The object of the [fourteenth] amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based on color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their public power. . .we cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveyances is unreasonable.15

The intersection between race and space here in this case is quite profound. This decision cements the establishment of black spaces and white spaces as a rule in race relations. Over a century later, most American neighborhoods, particularly New Orleans, are still divided along racial lines despite civil rights challenges to the contrary.16 The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 provides an interesting parallel to Hurricane Katrina, especially in its treatment of African Americans and the vulnerability of oppressed communities during natural disaster. It is reported that over 700,000 people were displaced during the floods and 330,000 were African Americans. The relief agencies respected Jim Crow policy and provided racially segregated shelters for those displaced. Barry chronicles the most vivid example of racial oppression, the fate of African American families in the Mississippi Delta during the flood.17 Black men were forced to work at gunpoint to increase levee protection. Once the water broke in Greenville, Mississippi, 13,000 blacks were forced to live in squatter conditions on the actual levee. The city of New Orleans was spared in the 1927 flood, in part because a portion of the levee in St. Bernard Parish was blown up with dynamite to keep the city from being flooded. Thus, allegations that the predominantly African American neighborhood in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans was similarly sacrificed during Hurricane Katrina are not entirely outrageous.18 At one time, the political elite of New Orleans did pull together to sacrifice the livelihood of St. Bernard Parish in the interest of New Orleans.19 Parallel to the development of racially segregated spaces was the transition of Louisiana’s agricultural economy to a petrochemical-based economy. The first successful oil well was established in 1901 in Jennings, Louisiana, marking the beginning of a century-long relationship between land, oil, and capital in Louisiana. The other major event that signaled a shift in the economic base was the decision by Rockefeller to build a Standard Oil refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1909.20 Southeastern Louisiana was attractive to the petrochemical industry due to the

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abundance of natural resources like salt, freshwater, oil, and natural gas, as well as transportation routes by rail and waterway along the Mississippi River.21 The conversion of sugarcane fields to petrochemical facilities resulted in what many refer to as cancer alley, the eighty-five-mile stretch of the Mississippi River corridor with over 100 chemical complexes. Many reports indicate that there is a disproportionate impact on the African American population in this area.22 Why? As former field workers of the sugarcane plantations, many of the African American neighborhoods found themselves sandwiched between these immense chemical complexes. In fact, Wright relates the corporate buyouts of historic African American communities. These communities were established as freetowns by former slaves after emancipation, and the buyouts represent the most extreme example of the impact of racialized spaces in Louisiana.23 Reveilletown was bought out by Georgia Gulf, Good Hope was purchased and moved by St. Charles Refinery, and the community of Sunrise was taken over by Placid Refining Company. Additionally, Morrisonville was relocated by Dow Chemical, and the former homes of this historic black community have become green space by the Dow complex grounds. One of the most heart-wrenching sacrifices of this relocation is the historic cemetery of Morrisonville, which is still located on Dow’s grounds. Former church members are allowed access to the gravesites, but the area is closed to the public. The pattern of environmental racism found in Louisiana provides even more evidence of racialized spaces in Louisiana. The environmental justice perspective is useful in understanding the racial disparities in the impacts of Katrina.24 KATRINA

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Racism stands apart by a practice of which it is a part and which it rationalizes: a practice that combines strategies of architecture and gardening with that of medicine—in the service of the construction of an artificial social order. . .racism manifests the conviction that a certain category of human beings cannot be incorporated into the rational order, whatever the effort. . . .The consequence is that racism is inevitably associated with the strategy of estrangement.25

The estimate of those displaced from Hurricane Katrina is akin to the number of African Americans who were displaced by massive restructuring of cities during urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s. The mass exodus or removal of African Americans is not a new phenomenon, and this is another reason why Katrina should be viewed as an elaboration on the ongoing theme of American racism. As with the rhetoric behind urban renewal policies, local politicians are not interested in promoting a new New Orleans with its former low-income residents. Also reminiscent of urban renewal, resources for neighborhood revitalization in New Orleans and all along the Gulf are prioritized according to race and class privilege. There has been a strong response from the academic community in the aftermath of the devastating hurricane season of 2005 and the horrors of Katrina. For example, many have spoken about the consequences of Katrina from various medical, social, behavioral, engineering, and religious perspectives. Others critique the political and militaristic systems that fostered the cataclysmic effects of Katrina on the Gulf Coast.

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My contention in this chapter is that Katrina’s aftermath should not be highlighted as something significantly different than what has happened in America’s racial history prior to August 2005. The racialized spaces hypothesis explicates the ways in which policy can be used to erect rigid racial boundaries. In the case of Louisiana, there has been evidence of these segregationist mechanisms. The most historic and significant event was the Plessy decision, which hailed from an incident on the East Louisiana Railroad. Other key early segregation policies centered on housing. Prior to 1930, the Louisiana state legislature enacted a series of laws to restrict housing and enforce segregation. In 1917, municipalities were granted the power to deny building permits for homes for both blacks and whites in areas principally inhabited by residents of a different race. This law was strengthened by a new statute in 1921 that provided penalties for housing blacks and whites in the same dwelling, with the exception of domestic help.26 In the case of Louisiana, containment is exemplified by the geographic and economic isolation of African Americans within the state. With the exception of New Orleans, the African American population of the state was historically situated in rural areas. This demography is no coincidence. Many strategies were employed to limit black mobility after emancipation. The first of such strategies included the Black Codes of 1865, vagrancy laws, and forms of debt peonage.27 The final element of the racialized spaces hypothesis is social control. If the previous element of history and containment served to create and subordinate black space, the institution of Jim Crow reified those spaces.28 Placed within this context of racialized spaces, there is no doubt that African Americans and the poor in New Orleans were burdened with disproportionate impact from the storm. The social position of African Americans throughout the history of Louisiana makes them vulnerable to the adverse impact of disasters, whether natural or manmade. Efforts to improve the fate of African Americans in the event of an emergency should begin with efforts to improve their social condition: better education, better homes, better jobs, and provide greater levels of access to opportunity. We cannot stop storms like Katrina, but we can ameliorate their impact. It is my contention that eradicating institutional racism and injustice would go far in lessening disproportionate burdens of disasters like Katrina.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, Barbara. “The Popular Geography of Illness in the Industrial Corridor.” In Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs, edited by Craig Colten, 178–201. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Barry, John. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Blauner, Robert. “Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt.” Social Problems 16, no. 4 (1969): 393–408. Bullard, R. D. “Confronting Environmental Racism: The Case of Shintech and Convent, Louisiana.” Testimony prepared for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality Hearing. Convent, LA: January 24, 1998.

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Bullard, Robert D. Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994. Burby, Raymond. “Baton Rouge: The Making (and Breaking) of a Petrochemical Paradise.” In Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs, edited by Craig Colten, 160–77. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Cohen, William. At Freedom’s Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1991. Colten, Craig. An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. de Jong, Greta. A Different Day: African-American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900–1970. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ducre, K. Animashaun “Racialized Spaces and the Emergence of Environmental Injustice.” In Echoes from the Poisoned Well: Global Memories of Environmental Injustice, edited by Sylvia Hood Washington, Paul C. Rosier, and Heather Goodall, 109–24. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2006. Dugas, Caroll Joseph. “The Dismantling of De Jure Segregation in Louisiana, 1954–1974.” PhD diss. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1989. Dyson, Michael Eric. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2006. Ellis, Catherine. “The Legacy of Jim Crow in Rural Louisiana.” PhD diss. New York: Columbia University, 2000. Hair, William Ivy. Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest: Louisiana Politics 1877–1900. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Halpern, Rick. “Solving the ‘Labour Problem’: Race, Work and the State in the Sugar Industries of Louisiana and Natal, 1870–1910.” Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 1 (2004): 19–40. Hines, Revathi I. “African Americans’ Struggle for Environmental Justice and the Case of the Shintech Plant.” Journal of Black Studies 31, no. 6 (2001): 777. Jackson, Kenneth. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Louisiana Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “The Battle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana. . .Government, Industry, and the People.” Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1993. Maguire, Robert E. Hustling to Survive: Social & Economic Change in a South Louisiana Creole Community. Vol. 2, Project Louisiane. Quebec: Departement de Geographie de l’Université Laval, 1989. Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Miller, Randall. “The Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction: An Overview.” In The Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction:Reconsiderations, edited by Paul Cimbala and Randall Miller, xiii–xxxii. New York: Fordham University Press, 1999. Pastor, M., R. D. Bullard, James Boyce, Alice Fothergill, R. Morello-Frosch, and Beverley Wright. In the Wake of the Storm: Environment, Disaster and Race after Katrina. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). Powell, Bernice, and R. D. Bullard. From Plantations to Plants: Report of the Emergency National Commission on Environmental and Economic Justice in St. James Parish, Louisiana. Cleveland, OH: United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, 1998. Reid, T.R. “Japanese Media Disparage Acquittal in ‘Freeze Case’: Commentators See America as Sick Nation.” Washington Post, May 25, 1993, p. A14.

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Ripley, C. Peter. Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Roberts, J. Timmons, and Melissa Toffolon-Weiss. “Roots of Environmental Injustice in Louisiana.” In Chronicles from the Environmental Justice Frontline, 29–41. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Rodrigue, John. “The Freedmen’s Bureau and Wage Labor in Louisiana Sugar Region.” In The Freedmen’s Bureau & Reconstruction: Reconsiderations, edited by Paul Cimbala and Randall Miller, 193–218. New York: Fordham University Press, 1999. U.S. Congress. Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina. A Failure of Initiative: Final Report of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina. 109th Congress, 2nd Session. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 2006. Shallat, Todd. “In the Wake of Hurricane Betsy.” In Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs, edited by Craig Colten, 121–37. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Sternberg, Mary Ann. Along the River Road. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.

NOTES 1. WORLDCat, Search:Hurricane Katrina, http://newfirstsearch.oclc.org.libezproxy2.syr .edu/WebZ/FSQUERY?format=BI:next=html/records.html:bad=html/records.html:n umrecs=10:sessionid=fsapp4–59032–eqwivfav-49sp8f:entitypagenum=2:0: searchtype=basic. 2. Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina, “A Failure of Initiative: Final Report of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina,” 109th Cong. 2nd Session, 2006, pp. 19–20. 3. T. R. Reid, “Japanese Media Disparage Acquittal in ‘Freeze Case’: Commentators See America as Sick Nation,” Washington Post, May 25, 1993. 4. R. D. Bullard, “Confronting Environmental Racism: The Case of Shintech and Convent, Louisiana.” Testimony prepared for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality hearing, Convent, LA, January 24, 1998; Revathi I Hines, “African Americans’ Struggle for Environmental Justice and the Case of the Shintech Plant,” Journal of Black Studies 31, no. 6 (2001). 5. K. Animashaun Ducre, “Racialized Spaces and the Emergence of Environmental Injustice,” in Echoes from the Poisoned Well: Global Memories of Environmental Injustice, ed. Sylvia Hood Washington, Paul C. Rosier, and Heather Goodall (Lanham: Lexington Book, 2006). 6. Robert Blauner, “Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt,” Social Problems 16, no. 4 (1969). 7. Mary Ann Sternberg, Along the River Road (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001). 8. Robert E. Maguire, Hustling to Survive: Social & Economic Change in a South Louisiana Creole Community, vol. 2, Project Louisiane (Québec: Université Laval, 1989). 9. John Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 10. Ibid. 11. William Cohen, At Freedom’s Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991).

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12. Ibid.; Greta de Jong, A Different Day: African-American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900–1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), Randall Miller, “The Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction: An Overview,” in The Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction:Reconsiderations, ed. Paul Cimbala and Randall Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), C. Peter Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press). 13. William Ivy Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protes: Louisiana Politics 1877-1900t (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969); Rick Halpern, “Solving the ‘Labour Problem’: Race, Work and the State in the Sugar Industries of Louisiana and Natal, 1870–1910,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 1 (2004). 14. John Rodrigue, “The Freedmen’s Bureau and Wage Labor in Louisiana Sugar Region,” in The Freedmen’s Bureau & Reconstruction: Reconsiderations. 15. Homer A. Plessy v. John H. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537; 16 S. Ct. 1138; 41 L. Ed. 256; 1896 U.S. Lexis 3390 (1896). 16. Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 17. Barry, Rising Tide. 18. Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2006). 19. Todd Shallat, “In the Wake of Hurricane Betsy,” in Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs, ed. Craig Colten (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). 20. Raymond Burby, “Baton Rouge, LA: The Making (and Breaking) of a Petrochemical Paradise,” in Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs, ed. Craig Colten (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Craig Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005). 21. Barbara Allen, “The Popular Geography of Illness in the Industrial Corridor,” in Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs. 22. Louisiana Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “The Battle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana. . .Government, Industry, and the People,” Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1993); Bernice Powell and R. D. Bullard, “From Plantations to Plants: Report of the Emergency National Commission on Environmental and Economic Justice in St. James Parish, Louisiana” (Cleveland: United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, 1998); J. Timmons Roberts and Melissa Toffolon-Weiss, “Roots of Environmental Injustice in Louisiana,” in Chronicles from the Environmental Justice Frontline (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 23. Robert D. Bullard, Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1994). 24. M. Pastor et al., “In the Wake of the Storm: Environment, Disaster and Race after Katrina,” (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). 25. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 65. 26. Caroll Joseph Dugas, “The Dismantling of De Jure Segregation in Louisiana, 1954–1974” (Louisiana State University Press, 1989). 27. Halpern, “Solving the ‘Labour Problem.’” 28. Catherine Ellis, “The Legacy of Jim Crow in Rural Louisiana” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2000).

C h a p t e r

6

AN INTERVIEW WITH JUDGE IVAN L. R. LEMELLE SUZETTE M. MALVEAUX

The Honorable Ivan L. R. Lemelle (E. D. La)* was born in 1950 and grew up in a small, rural town outside of Lafayette, Louisiana—Opelousas. He graduated from Xavier University and Loyola University, as well as the New Orleans School of Law, and then practiced law in the private and public sectors. He was appointed a United States Magistrate Judge in 1984 and then United States District Judge (Eastern District of Louisiana) in 1988 by President Clinton. Judge Lemelle, one of many displaced citizens of New Orleans and the only African American district judge on the United States District Court in the Eastern District of Louisiana, presided over Wallace v. Blanco, a federal lawsuit challenging Louisiana’s emergency election plan for failing to sufficiently protect the voting rights of the primarily African American New Orleans population displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF) and local counsel from Louisiana argued that measures taken by the state legislature were inadequate and would disenfranchise temporary evacuees from participating in New Orleans’s April 2006 primary and May 2006 runoff elections, in which the mayor and city council selections would be made. The LDF contended that the state’s voting scheme was inadequate and threatened to disproportionately impact black voters, in violation of the Voting Rights Act. While the city’s primary election did not take place on February 4 as originally planned, it was later slated for April 22, a date many civil rights organizations and leaders challenged as too soon. Judge Lemelle, while recognizing room for improvement in the electoral process, refused to delay the election. Judge Lemelle shared his thoughts on why he permitted New Orleans’s first municipal elections post-Katrina to go forward, how Katrina has impacted the city

*Judge Lemelle is the author’s cousin. This interview took place on June 16, 2006.

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and himself personally, and what lessons can be learned for the future. Judge Lemelle also reflected on what it is like to be one of the few African American federal judges in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and on the pioneers that inspired him. * * * SM: Tell us about Opelousas, Louisiana and what that was like when you were young, growing up there. JUDGE LEMELLE: I was born in Opelousas, Louisiana. Most of my early and high school years were spent in the public and Catholic school systems in Opelousas. Upon graduation, I went on to obtain degrees from Xavier University in New Orleans and the Loyola School of Law. During those formative years in Opelousas, I still recall some of the used and marked books that were discarded by the white Catholic school and sent to us at the black Catholic school—Holy Ghost Catholic School. My parents emphasized education as the key to overcoming racial barriers. SM: So what made you decide to become a judge? JUDGE LEMELLE: A difficult decision made easy with the help of some heroes in the early civil rights era. Founding members of the law firm I practiced in, Judge Robert Collins, who later became the first African American federal judge in the Deep South. Judge Nils Douglas, a magistrate judge commissioner in state court. And Lolis Elie, attorney, activist, and frequent judge pro tem in the state courts, Ron Nabonne, Jeff Wilkerson, and Okla Jones II, all alumni like me from the same firm, provided encouragement and support. They thought the time was right for someone to be the first black magistrate judge in the federal courts in Louisiana. Through their persistence and with additional support from my family, I accepted the challenge and applied. The Eastern District of Louisiana has a grand history of brilliant jurists. I was presented with a chance to walk in the footsteps of J. Skelly Wright, Alvin Rubin, Fred Heebe, and many others. SM: What kind of challenges have you had being the only African American judge in the Eastern District of Louisiana? And one of the few in the Fifth Circuit? JUDGE LEMELLE: We have ten African American jurists in the Fifth Circuit. The Fifth Circuit, as you know, is one of the busiest circuits in the country. The challenges that I face are no different than when Judge Collins was the first and only one, when Judge Okla Jones II was the second and only one. Court employees, especially minority members, would often present us concerns about working conditions, hiring and promotion practices. I was honored when our Chief Judge appointed me to be the chairman of our court’s EEO [Equal Employment Opportunity] and affirmative action committee. Through the years, we were able to resolve a lot of complaints. People felt comfortable talking to us and not discouraged in bringing issues they might otherwise stay silent about. While not an issue for me, I could sense some misgivings in a few, not most, senior members of downtown majority firms who appeared in Title VII racial discrimination litigation. But I did not have the time or inclination to prove myself to anyone. Justice had to be served by an impartial application of law to facts, not by perceptions or one-sided thinking.

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SM: Can you tell me about Hurricane Katrina? How has that impacted your life? You were in New Orleans. You’ve been in New Orleans for how long? JUDGE LEMELLE: Since 1967. Along with our fellow citizens, we were displaced from our homes by the storms and [are] still coping with every imaginable and unexpected matter in the aftermath of our exodus. Our family home is in New Orleans East. Katrina‘s path came right over that area. It left us with an average flood depth of eight feet. My home had over six feet of water. It settled at four feet for about ten days before it finally drained out. My first floor was devastated. My second floor is intact but damaged by wind, hail, and looting that occurred in our neighborhood. But, you know, I was lucky. My family safely evacuated before that momentous day, August 29, 2005. We lost close friends as a direct result of the storm and a sister-inlaw’s husband as an indirect result of the same. Our material losses pale in light of the human casualties. There was a total collapse of our infrastructure. New Orleans East is the largest land area of the city, composed of a significant number of middle-class African Americans, including my subdivision, Lake Willow. Solo practitioner lawyers, doctors, poor people, retirees, [and] teachers who evacuated ultimately found, in many instances, better opportunities elsewhere. But most still want to return home to New Orleans. Many just could not afford to come back to New Orleans. As a Red Cross volunteer in Lafayette, Louisiana, where I eventually relocated to, I vividly recall meeting an eighty-plus-year-old couple. . .evacuees from Betsy, and again Katrina. The only reason they are alive was because they recalled from Betsy that a lot of people died from drowning or suffocation in the attics of their homes, trying to escape the flood. Accordingly, this couple kept an axe to cut a hole in the roof of the attic, in the event that there was another hurricane that forced them into the attic. And that‘s what they did in Katrina. They were rescued from their home’s rooftop in New Orleans East by helicopter. The wife told me, “Judge, I never saw him move so fast in chopping the hole in that attic!” And he said to me, “You know, Judge, the only frightful moment I had was not when the flood came and when I was chopping that hole—because I know I was going to get us out and on the roof.” He said the most frightening moment was when he was being lifted by the helicopter up in the air towards roaring helicopter blades. They never flew on any aircraft before in their life. He related how the helicopter’s basket kept swinging and turning. And he‘s laughing about it. And I‘m almost in tears. Here they are telling me this story in a very nonchalant, casual, calm and soothing way. I‘m listening and I told them, “You gave me more strength in the telling of that story than I‘m giving to you, and I‘m supposed to be your comforter as a Red Cross volunteer.” When I came back the next day, they were evacuated from the Red Cross shelter in Lafayette and sent to Houston. One of my biggest disappointments since the evacuation was not being able to locate and follow up with this beautiful couple. God bless them for giving this ill-prepared “Red Crosser” comfort. * * * New Orleans municipal elections were initially set for February 4, 2006, but were postponed on account of state officials’ contentions that the elections could not be

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held so soon after the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. This postponement prompted a lawsuit by New Orleans citizens who argued that an indefinite delay in the electoral process deprived citizens of their voting rights, in violation of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. Consequently, the state set April 22, 2006, as the date for the primary election. On February 23–24, 2006, and March 27, 2006, Judge Lemelle heard oral argument by plaintiffs’ counsel in Wallace v. Chertoff, Civil Action No. 05-5519 (which was consolidated with Tisserand v. Blanco, Civil Action No. 05-6487, and ACORN v. Blanco, Civil Action No. 06-611), arguing for a delay in the New Orleans municipal elections scheduled for April 22, 2006. At the March 27, 2006 hearing, plaintiffs’ counsel, among other things, challenged the state election law requiring first-time voters who registered by mail to vote in person at a registrar’s office or polling place. Counsel contended that requiring evacuees to return to Louisiana to vote imposed on them an unreasonable financial burden, comparable to a poll tax. Plaintiffs’ counsel also challenged the state election law that provided for in-state satellite voting in cities in the state of Louisiana. Counsel contended that satellite voting should also be made available in cities outside of Louisiana. On March 27, 2006, Judge Lemelle denied the Wallace Plaintiffs Motion to Reconsider, Alter, or Amend. “Recognizing the importance of the issues raised and the need for further monitoring,” Judge Lemelle also ordered that the parties’ counsel meet within that week and submit, among other things, “an update on voter information/outreach initiatives, absentee balloting, polling locations and staffing of same, election day monitoring” so that he could address any remaining issues. See Order of Mar. 27, 2006. New Orleans’s first post-Katrina municipal elections were held on April 22, 2006, as scheduled. A runoff election was held on May 20, 2006. Incumbent Mayor Ray Nagin was reelected after defeating Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu. * * * SM: Let me turn to the litigation that came before you in your court. I’ve looked at some of the court filings and the record. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and others have argued that the state of Louisiana’s emergency election scheme was going to disenfranchise a lot of displaced New Orleanians, and disproportionately African Americans. The plaintiffs were concerned that first-time voters would have to come back to Louisiana to vote and that they could not vote by absentee ballot. The plaintiffs were also concerned that evacuees would be disenfranchised because there wasn’t satellite voting outside of the state of Louisiana. The plaintiffs wanted Atlanta, Houston—some of the places where a lot of people had been dislocated—to also have satellite voting sites. Consequently, plaintiffs asked for a delay in the primary election. Can you tell me about your decision not to permit that delay? JUDGE LEMELLE: I will try giving you the procedural background, how it got started and, to some extent, how it ended. The first of three lawsuits was brought by a group contending that Governor Blanco’s call for an election in September [2006] was going to lead to disenfranchisement of minority voters, and by not calling the election before then would have

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some impact on minority voters. So it was quite the opposite of what was eventually argued when the NAACP LDF was allowed by me to join the case. After several hearings, there were two other lawsuits that brought somewhat similar, yet dissimilar, claims in terms of what relief they were seeking. The cases were heard on an expedited basis. After evidentiary hearings, I, ruled that if the state did not take action to call the election on the date that the original plaintiffs wanted, I might be forced to do so— on the basis that it would lead to disenfranchisement of African American voters. In ruling, I strongly urged the state legislature to consider some other methods of voting, because after Katrina a lot of things—not just in terms of elections, but in terms of everything that affected normal life activities—changed and were being done in different ways. So I directed the parties to meet with the Legislature and the Governor‘s representatives. I wanted everyone to get together to see if they could come up with a plan—resolve some of the differences. If they couldn’t, they would come back to me. A plan was eventually presented. Initially, the plan was rejected by the Legislature, causing the Legislative Black Caucus to walk out of the session. When I heard news of the rejection, then obviously, I was disappointed. I expressed that disappointment to parties’ counsel and told them to try again. Shortly thereafter, the Legislature reconsidered the proposals. All the proposals passed that were being sought, except for two. The two that did not get implemented, or were not considered, were the one that was going to set up satellite voting outside of the state and the other concern[ing] first-time voters. The major changes that passed involved certain provisions for firsttime voters and satellite voting outside of Orleans Parish in other parts of the state. Ultimately, another hearing was called by me to consider what was done and not done and whether or not there was evidence of voter disenfranchisement. None was found. I signed a judgment recently on all three cases, and those cases are now closed. I‘m told that the election returns showed the percentage of black turnout was comparable to what it was pre-Katrina in mayoral elections. I don‘t know if that‘s correct or not. It’s possible that another lawsuit involving similar claims might urge similar issues for a different election. Courts of law can only rule based upon the record evidence and applicable law, not upon outside-the-record influences. I based my rulings on evidence presented to me in court, and that evidence led to the relief I ultimately approved. SM: I want to go to some of the media coverage at the time you made your decision. There were a number of civil rights organizations that argued that requiring firsttime voters to vote in person was equivalent to a poll tax. Did that argument resonate with you at all, given the historical racial discrimination in Louisiana and other states in the South? JUDGE LEMELLE: I know the history of the Voting Rights Act. The firm that I was with—all of us in the firm—at one time or another, had a civil rights case. We worked on voting rights cases; we were involved in a number of election lawsuits as lawyers for black litigants. I think that the lawyers in this case, particularly the lawyers for the original set of plaintiffs, who are local evacuees themselves in Lafayette and Houston—did a fine job.

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Subsequently, when we allowed the NAACP Legal Defense team to get involved, they did, as I expected, excellent work on behalf of their clients. Their legal arguments were all on point. Did it influence me? It had influence. But again, we can argue legal points of view and argue what the Voting Rights Act stands for, but you still have that burden of proof, to show with factual evidence that this is a disenfranchisement in some manner or another. And if [disenfranchisement is] proven, the relief has to be balanced and focused in light of several factors. There was insufficient evidence to fashion any more relief than what was already obtained. SM: Why not delay? If you could have permitted more people to be enfranchised, then why not push back the election to make that possible? JUDGE LEMELLE: There was a group of plaintiffs who wanted the election called earlier, and I didn’t allow that; it would have been too early. There was also a belief that holding it too late would also lead to disenfranchisement. Voters were entitled to vote, and the elections were supposed to be held in February [2006]. They couldn’t be held in February [2006]—that was too early. Do you delay it until possibly September? Would that effectively lead to disfranchisement because of a likely impact upon voter interest or turnout? Should that matter? It’s an important election—mayor, city council, assessor—elections were designated under the city charter for a certain date. To delay it any further than necessary would be problematic. New Orleanians wanted to come home; they wanted normalcy in their lives—at least that road to normalcy, if not that exactly. And to do otherwise, to me, would deflate their expectations. The most powerful tool of minorities in any society, in a democratic society like ours, is the power of the vote. Every vote counts—regardless of wealth, color, or any other factor—to determine the direction of society through elected representatives of the people. That‘s power. The Voting Rights Act, while in some respects imperfect, is designed to help protect that power. The people of our city had a need, a right, to feel like they have a right to determine where this city‘s headed. There were some angry voters out there. People, for one reason or another, justified or not, felt official efforts to promote normalcy and rebuilding were ineffective or untimely. I cannot speculate whether my decision—coupled with outside demonstrations related to it—contributed in positive ways to voter turnout. I like to think it did. My object or role in deciding a voting rights case is not what the turnout is, because that‘s after the fact. It’s to deal with it before, and to make certain that legal rights are protected. There was some speculation that black voters did not trust absentee or mail-in balloting. But more black voters voted absentee and by mailing in this election than ever before, because they were out of town, displaced. The same motivations that cause a white person to vote absentee will be the same motivations that cause a black person to vote absentee. Even more so here. SM: Did you ever think, though, because the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and ACORN, and Jesse Jackson and Marc Morial [Urban League President and former mayor of New Orleans]—because major civil rights organizations and leaders were taking a position counter to yours that your position was not the correct one?

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JUDGE LEMELLE: I respect anyone’s right to disagree. However, I would not be a good judge if I based my judicial rulings on matters outside the trial record. In January 2005, Iraqi expatriates were able to participate in Iraq’s first democratic elections held in fifty years, by casting their ballots at satellite polling places located in five cities throughout the United States. Had the attorneys come into court and given me some evidence, some proof, something to show for instance, how did the government set up the system of voting for displaced Iraqi nationals, I could have considered such as evidence—they and such evidence were not offered. I asked them, “Well, how do you do that? How is that done? What did it take?” If I had gotten some proof along those lines, then it could have affected the extent of available relief, but I never got those answers to my questions. I cannot base my decision in any case on what I read about in the press, see on TV, or hear on the radio. My sister-in-law participated in the march [challenging the state’s emergency election scheme]. She was back in New Orleans. She felt as if my decision was going to make people come here and vote because they were going to be ticked off, they were going to be mad. Later, when she saw the electoral turnout, she said, “Maybe you did the right thing after all.” I hope she’s right. I called it based on the facts presented in court. SM: There was an article that came out in the New York Times that said something to the effect that you had chastized social activists for using people who were suffering.1 Do you recall anything like that? JUDGE LEMELLE: One of the lawyers during a hearing argued what some protesters were saying. I asked in response, “Where are those civil rights leaders? They‘re not in my courtroom today. I’ve asked for this before. If they have testimony on something bring them to court. I can‘t go beyond the record. Where is that proof?” I respect Jesse Jackson, I respect Marc Morial. Particularly Jesse Jackson, for his early role in the hard and very dangerous period of the civil rights struggle. We‘re the beneficiaries of his efforts. Certainly I would have been impressed by having Jesse Jackson in my courtroom. Just his presence, and listening to what he had to say in my courtroom, would have been a momentous occasion. But I couldn’t base my ruling on what he had to say to the press. So it wasn’t chastising them; it was more to the lawyers saying, “Are you going to call them as witnesses, counselor?” My intent was not to chastise anyone. I didn’t have a right to. The press, perhaps, took it that way. I do question anyone’s underestimation of the human resolve, the will of the people to overcome Katrina’s wrath, by participating in the electoral process. Black voters, like white voters, have a right to participate in the electoral process. And to say that simply because you are going to have to now vote absentee or by mail is not in itself a violation of the Voting Rights Act. You have to show how that is going to negatively impact black voters. My people are displaced. The evidence showed that they were going to vote—for a number of reasons. I had one witness who was a major civil rights leader in New Orleans and displaced to Georgia. He said that come hell or high water he was going to vote, no matter what. That impressed me. He disagreed with my ultimate findings. He thought there should be satellite voting outside the state. I respectfully disagree with the unproven notion that the absence of some, as a legal matter, would lead to voter disenfranchisement.

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SM: Do you think there are lessons here that have been learned? JUDGE LEMELLE: Quite a bit. In terms of voter election laws, the public learned more about the electoral process. I authorized, for instance, election day monitors to further assist and educate voters and voting day commissioners. New Orleanians are rebuilding and are on that bumpy road to normalcy. Voters in New Orleans East, Gentilly, Lakeview, and Lower Ninth Ward, among others, will probably have to return in the future to mega precincts in order to vote. I voted in Lafayette in both elections. I was thankful to see and hear about voter commissioners and registrars throughout Louisiana who were very hospitable, courteous, and professional to displaced voters. SM: If there‘s data that shows that some of the election procedures had a disproportionate impact on African American voters, then changes could take place for the September election. For example, satellite voting polls outside of Louisiana and permitting first-time voters to vote by mail. Maybe those kinds of changes could occur in time for the September election. JUDGE LEMELLE: And you’ve got some other variables too. A big unknown right now is, “Of the New Orleanians who evacuated, who‘s returning back? Are they returning back?” We did a lot of soul searching to determine whether or not we‘re going to rebuild or return to New Orleans. I wish I could convince everybody who left to come back, but I realize they have to make their own personal decisions after assessing many factors that affect individual concerns. SM: As the only African American judge in the Eastern District,. . .you are [probably] seen as a leader and a role model. Do you think that people understand what was behind your decision to return? JUDGE LEMELLE: I’m one little cog in the wheel amongst several cogs. Am I flattered by the thought that somehow I may inspire people to action? Of course. I‘m taking a risk like everyone else does in rebuilding. The future is uncertain, with no guarantees. SM: Did you ever think about not coming back? JUDGE LEMELLE: No, never did; that never entered my mind. SM: Why? JUDGE LEMELLE: Suzette, when I came back the first time—and as devastated as my home was—I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t have power. I didn’t have water or gas. I didn’t have anything, but I wanted to stay on the second floor; just me, I wouldn’t put my family through that. But there was mold everywhere and people said, “Oh no, you‘re going to get sick.” My family would have suffered more out of concern for me had I done that. So I didn’t stay. But every time I go back home, it’s very difficult for me to leave. . .very difficult. Concern over the suffering conditions of homes and neighbors drive me to return. Remembrances—Lake Willow constantly pulls me back and one day I will stay.

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What really hurts is when I hear people who are not coming back, like my neighbor, a physician, at the peak of his career, in a home he and his wife put everything into. Yeah, [sighing] those are the hurting things—to lose neighbors, friends, family, et cetera. We learn our lessons and one of the things I guess you learn in this is who are your true friends. And you learn a lot about human nature as a result of it. SM: And about yourself. JUDGE LEMELLE: Oh! A lot about myself. A lot of things I didn’t even want to know! It scares me! [He laughs.] Like I told you when I didn’t want to leave the house. I look back on that and I said, “Hmm, what would have happened to me had I stayed?” Then again, I was there yesterday. I go as often as I can. Life in the “Big Easy” has everyone Katrina-weary, yet steadfast in seeing the city’s rebirth.

NOTE 1. “Judge Orders New Orleans to Proceed With Election,” New York Times, March 28, 2006.

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P a r t

I I

CULTURE, TRADITION, AND IDENTITY

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C h a p t e r

7

NEW ORLEANS’S AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSICAL TRADITIONS: THE SPIRIT AND SOUL OF A CITY MICHAEL WHITE

It has become fashionable to label August 2005’s devastating Hurricane Katrina as “the greatest natural disaster in American history,” when considering the combined loss of life, massive destruction, economic impact, and prolonged displacement of citizens. What is less often discussed is that from the perspective of New Orleans’s African American population, Katrina’s aftermath has potentially launched the greatest cultural disaster in this country’s history. The United States is a comparatively young nation that lacks the presence of many original vernacular traditions and the rich cultural history that can be found in Africa, Europe, and Asia. Despite this, the city of New Orleans embodies the variety, longevity, level of community involvement, and social relevance of its several one-hundred-plus-year-old African American folk traditions. Though not generally understood beyond its entertainment value, the best known New Orleans cultural tradition is jazz. First taking shape around the late 1890s, jazz’s lively rhythms and largely improvised instrumental melodies facilitated its transition from its birthplace throughout the world. By the 1920s, this musical genre had begun to influence most popular music and had become the ideological basis for the spirited “Jazz Age.” It was also well on its way to being universally viewed as “America’s only truly original artistic contribution.” Other local customs—such as brass bands, social club parades, jazz funerals, and Mardi Gras Indian processions—have, until recent decades, remained almost hidden in the heart of New Orleans’s African American community—socially, physically, and psychologically removed from most of white New Orleans and a large number of culturally isolated blacks.

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The African American population of New Orleans shares with the rest of black America a varied and distinct existence formed by centuries of blending of African, European, and other ethnicities. Many black visitors from other American cities, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America notice New Orleans’s uniqueness, yet they also express a strong spiritual and ancestral identification with the city as feeling like “home.” New Orleans’s physical distance from other large urban areas, its varied social makeup, and its cultural history have combined to form one of the most rich, diverse, and distinctive subcultures in American history. The local black population contributed greatly to New Orleans’s unique nature, spirit, and identity. Though not often recognized or acknowledged as such—even among natives—jazz represents a synthesis and transformation of several cultures, with a dominant West African influence, that laid the fertile background from which emerged the plethora of New Orleans’s rich cultural traditions. Many who view the New Orleans jazz tradition rarely recognize that jazz and other local music are all aspects of an endemic community lifestyle and philosophy that also manifests in a unique local approach to neighborhoods, family, language, cooking, dancing, humor, celebration, worship, and other aspects of life.

MUSIC

IN

NEW ORLEANS

AND THE

AFRICAN AMERICAN POPULATION

Since its founding and early colonization by the French in 1718, New Orleans was destined to be different from other American cities. Its location along the Mississippi River near the Gulf of Mexico contributed to its use as a major port—and made possible long-term exposure to Caribbean and other Latin American cultural influences. From the beginning, hardship and tragedy resulting from a geographically harsh and vulnerable environment and a series of devastating natural disasters led to a common special appreciation for life. Many holidays and feast days observed in the predominantly Catholic city also contributed to a longstanding obsession among New Orleanians with excessive pleasure seeking through food, alcohol, music, dancing, and celebration. These customary “necessities” often took precedence over “less serious issues,” such as punctuality, business, and progress. During the nineteenth century, New Orleans experienced a wide range of musical activity—from opera and classical forms, to military marching bands, dance music, religious songs and various ethnic folk music styles. The large, diverse population of slaves and free blacks was often exposed to and participated in an unusually wide range of musical styles. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, a tradition of authentic West African drumming, chanting, dancing, and celebrating was performed by scores of slaves and later free blacks on Sunday afternoons at an open public field known as Congo Square. African-style musical practices existed in New Orleans far beyond the legally sanctioned public spectacles of Congo Square in secret voodoo ceremonies, in private locations and along levees, bayous, and Lake Pontchartrain. While these ancestral traditions evolved and disappeared underground by the twentieth century, their existence is strongly felt in the spirit of exciting rhythms, creative dancing, and collective community celebration that colors and serves as the foundation for most indigenous and local versions of music, ranging from jazz, gospel, and rhythm and blues, to funk and contemporary hip-hop styles.

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The cultural diversity within “black New Orleans” is also unique in America, consisting of distinctive strains of African tribes and significant blendings of Haitians, Americans Indians, French, Spanish, English, and other ethnic groups— all of whom contributed to the rich cultural heritage of pre-Katrina’s native population. Miscegenation, a practice that stems from the French practice of long-term illicit liaisons with black women, brought about an almost unheard-of third social tier: the Creoles of Color. For many generations, these mulattos were a highly visible and vibrant force in New Orleans culture. They were a privileged class, comfortably wedged between black and white society. Among the largely free Creoles, many were well schooled in European classical music, with several developing active careers as performers, composers, teachers, and devotees. The tense post-Reconstruction social climate had important effects on black New Orleans culture. New Orleans had been a city in which blacks were accustomed to a certain degree of freedom, comfort, and mobility. The optimism resulting from winning legal battles, successful civil rights protests, and having black elected officials and government promises began to disappear under a new wave of white supremacy, violence, and racial oppression. Creoles of Color were officially and legally defined as “Negroes,” resulting in the loss of their privileged status, economic power, and other rights. An air of confusion, anger, and defiance arose among a collective black population whose quest for freedom and equality would not be easily compromised. ORIGINS

OF

JAZZ

While national black leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington sought ways to organize, combat racism, and improve the black condition in American society, black New Orleans’s most significant response to these issues was a locally contained cultural revolution. As many legal struggles were being stifled— as by the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case, which originated among black New Orleans activists—social and economic conditions worsened. The defiant spirit of the times and the traditional celebratory character of New Orleans synthesized to create a new musical form—jazz—which expressed, through sound and related movement (dancing), the hopes, aspirations, emotions, and needs of black New Orleans. This new music (not called “jazz” until years later) was a collective creation drawn from various musical, social, cultural, ancestral, ethnic, and religious elements that formed the total black New Orleans experience. There were a number of practical and logical reasons for the origins of jazz. Along with the forced legal merger between blacks and Creoles of Color came a cultural one, which led to a great degree of teaching, exchange and blending of distinct musical traditions. The Creoles’ familiarity with European classical instruments, techniques, and repertoire synthesized with the local African American folk tradition of work songs, spirituals, blues, ragtime, dance music, ethnic folk songs, rhythmic interplay and authentic African-style celebrations to create a new form of expression that would have far-reaching social and cultural implications and would also change the direction of western music. Regardless of any economic or social conditions, the local obsession with music, dancing, and good times never waned among most black and whites in late

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nineteenth-century New Orleans. African American musicians had many opportunities to perform in a variety of contexts for all social classes. A tradition of skilled black and Creole reading musicians, who played in refined dance orchestras and European-style marching bands, had been a source of pride and respect. This practice grew steadily after the Civil War. Like other Southern areas with large black populations, New Orleans also had various types of African American folk music in the form of work songs, street cries, spirituals, and dance music. After the Civil War and into the twentieth century, thousands of poor black immigrants from neighboring states brought musical traditions, such as the rural blues, which were absorbed into the rich gumbo pot of local sound and expression. It was in this climate of social turbulence and vibrant musical activity during the late 1890s that legendary cornetist Charles “Buddy” Bolden and others were among the first to employ a looser, freer, more exciting, personal, improvised approach to playing ragtime, blues, hymns, marches, and popular dance music. Music had been an attractive option for African Americans to earn extra income and achieve a greater degree of mobility. The local demand for music grew to exceed the number of trained reading players and available musical scores. As a result, bands were often smaller, and by necessity many groups consisted of nonreading musicians who memorized, adapted or improvised their parts. Bolden was among the earliest to experiment with various music styles and to apply vocal effects, feeling, and rhythms of black blues and hymn singing to horn playing. Soon, this hotter, more exciting style became popular among both musicians and dancers in public parks, dance halls and community parades. Though never universally accepted, jazz groups gradually replaced many of the refined reading society orchestras and marching bands that had previously dominated. Early jazz did not attempt to ignore or destroy the rules of European classical music (which governed most popular music of the day); it extended and reinterpreted conventional musical principles by blending them with an African-influenced folk approach to tone, melody, and rhythm. Underlying jazz performance was an almost existential philosophy of music and life, which offered the public a living, visible, and audible democratic model of the freedom and equality being sought by African Americans in social, economic, and political arenas throughout the nation. More than a limited repertoire of specific songs, early New Orleans jazz was an approach that was applicable to music of almost any style. It was characterized by collective improvisation and steady driving rhythms—created by various combinations of a horn section (trumpet or cornet, clarinet and trombone) and a rhythm section (banjo, bass, drums and piano). Under a steady, danceable rhythmic pulse, the trumpet played a melodic lead as the other horns “answered” in call-and-responsetype musical conversations. Much more than the stereotype of just “playing what you feel,” there was a consciously constructed ensemble approach consisting of freedom with a general role or direction for each instrument. In this context, equal importance was given to the development of both individual and collective aspects. Possessing an individual personal tone and expression was as important an objective as was using one’s sound for the sake of creating a more swinging, unified and identifiable group. Most early New Orleans jazz emphasized this instrumental ensemble approach and limited the use of vocals and improvised solos.

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By the early 1900s, jazz had become a functional musical expression of the core local black community (and had also begun to be adopted by some whites). It was seen and heard in many neighborhoods at almost any time, accompanying a wide variety of functions, including dances, picnics, boat rides, sporting events, bars, weddings, and parties. Many families used jazz as a form of diversion by forming bands with each member playing a different instrument. An active musical family tradition developed, which contributed greatly to the core of professional and seminal New Orleans jazz players. This custom continues as a vital aspect of local culture and music across several generations and musical styles. The range of early jazzmen went from self-taught nonreaders to well-trained reading musicians. Several prominent African American music teachers had provided varying degrees of schooling—both privately and in groups—to a large number of young future jazz players.

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One of the most important aspects of the New Orleans jazz tradition—in terms of its social significance and potential for widespread community interaction—is that it has also functioned at the center of a vibrant street culture: open to all ages, classes, genders, and ethnic groups. A common occurrence in the early 1900s was seeing jazz bands playing atop advertising wagons that rolled through various neighborhoods. When two wagons met, the bands would engage in a competitive “cutting contest,” which drew large crowds of “judges.” The most widespread and socially relevant function of jazz among New Orleans’s African American population was the tradition of street parades, which continued throughout the twentieth century and into 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. By 1900, dozens of benevolent societies and “social aid and pleasure clubs” had become a well-needed black staple that addressed a variety of social, political, and economic concerns and provided much-cherished entertainment. It was these organizations that became the principal sponsors of jazz-related activities in the African American community, the most popular of which were dances, parades, and funerals. The tradition of black social club parades was very different in style, purpose, and form from the better-known, mainly white Mardi Gras parades of New Orleans. These annual social club functions passed through black neighborhoods on Sundays and lasted several hours. The community-oriented processions consisted of three main components: social club members, brass bands, and the crowd. Social clubs may have had several divisions of elaborately adorned members. Often, a considerable amount of money was spent on special outfits purchased for one day’s use. Many times, club members wore extremely bold color combinations or extreme variations of the same color. As they walked and danced through the streets, club members carried beautifully adorned umbrellas, canes, baskets, fans, or handkerchiefs, all of which were used for dancing. Forming a visual contrast to club divisions were one or more hired brass bands, which were traditionally adorned in dark band uniforms or black pants, white shirts and white band caps. A typical traditional New Orleans brass band is a ten- to twelve-piece “marching” (in reality, just walking) jazz ensemble, consisting of three

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trumpets, two trombones, a tuba, a clarinet, a bass drum, a snare drum and two lower brass instruments (later replaced by saxophones). As with smaller jazz combos, collective improvisation and a loosely executed role for each instrument are the essence of their performance style. The bands walked between club divisions to a static military beat when not playing their standard repertoire of jazzed-up marches, hymns, blues, and other lively songs. The louder, more raucous brass band sound was characterized by a distinctive, very danceable underlying beat—drawn from West African rhythms. This medium tempo pulse and its variations were prominently played on the bass drum—in counterpoint to a steady basic tuba line. This “second line beat” served as the motivating force behind spirited mutual inspiration and interaction between musicians and dancers. The distinctive brass band parade rhythm is the foundation for and a dominant influence on not only New Orleans jazz, but also other local musical styles. The last but equally important part of a black social club parade was the “second line”—a crowd of up to thousands of anonymous followers who seemed to appear from nowhere with the first hypnotic three-beat song introduction of the bass drum. Much more than casual observers, this multitude of souls followed along the side and in back of the parade—dancing, cheering, and collecting others throughout its duration. The “second line” dance of the club members and crowd was a free-form West African–influenced set of movements that accompanied and paralleled jazz— in terms of its characteristic collective and individually improvised variations. “Second liners” often used a basic shuffle step with feet close to the ground, but an endless variety of jumping, crawling, shaking, spinning, and other motions were also common. Despite significant changes in brass band sound and appearance after the late 1970s, the overall look and spirit of social club parades continued into August 2005 much as they had for over one hundred years. Finding oneself in the midst of such a spectacle could cause one to feel like one was being hypnotically swept along in a massive spiritual “human tsunami.” It was impossible to see or hear more than a fraction of the millions of subtle ripples of motion, sound, and ecstasy that regularly occurred during these processions. A casual glance in any direction would reveal frenzied dancers everywhere: on the tops of cars, swinging from light posts, “hovering” over the roofs of building, riding through the crowd on the backs of others, moving in and out of impromptu circle formations, or gliding belly down in the street—all the while keeping perfect time and pace with the parade. In this sea of various shades of black skin there were young faces and old faces; soft faces and hard faces; faces on bicycles and in cars, doorways and windows. Normal sensory perception was altered, as time, space, weather, age, class, and physical ailments seemed to disappear in a steamy tidal wave of hot music and dancing. Walking canes and crutches that rarely left the ground were suddenly hoisted high, like the club members’ umbrellas. Elderly faces, wrinkled, tired, and helpless from years of struggle—now glowed with youthful joy. Babies, too young to walk, gleefully wiggled in their mothers’ arms—also in tempo with the music. Even house pets occasionally came along and got caught up in the frenzy. Major disappointment often came at parade’s end, when the participants “awoke” from the trance to discover themselves on another side of town and facing the difficult task of having to “walk” back the same distance they had just danced.

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To some participants these activities were nothing more than fun—a pleasant diversion from daily routines. For many more conscious African Americans of New Orleans, a redefinition of existence—pointing toward the unjust social and political structure—was a fundamental underlying theme of early jazz and social club parades. One typical example is the popular standard European march song (with its common challenging array of strict rules and varying key changes, several sections, and harmonic and melodic shifts). In New Orleans both musicians (and dancers) regularly transformed this originally static form into a freer, more rhythmic, relaxed, personal, lively and enjoyable set of musical possibilities. Thus, at the time of their origin, these parades offered the black community a euphoric transformation into a temporary democratic world characterized by free, open participation and self-expression through sound, movement, and symbolic visual statements. A variety of passions and attitudes that may have been repressed in normal daily life could be released in the security of these processions. Impositions and limitations of “second class” social status could be replaced by a democratic existence in which one could be or become things not generally open to blacks in the “normal” world: competitive, victorious, defiant, equal, unique, hostile, humorous, aloof, beautiful, brilliant, wild, sensual, and even majestic. The social club parade often became a massive, almost religious-like gathering of African Americans, which, under the guise of entertainment, could also be a form of protest: a show of strength and unity and a defiant march toward freedom and democracy in a society where such assemblies would normally be discouraged or illegal. There were also other implications and symbolism: from the loud, colorful club outfits (in contrast with the more conservative band uniforms), through the unrestricted freedom of the “second line” dancing, which often included dancing with or on top of any objects or structures that one came upon, to the occasional songs, which had breaks (brief pauses) that were filled in by shouts from the crowd. What was so blatantly (and simply) demonstrated time and again by various aspects of social club parades was that all forms of existence are acceptable and can function together. To a larger extent the concepts of possibility and transformation in music and dance had implications pointing toward a more just restructuring of society, politics, and life in general. Over the course of a several-month-long social club parade season (and throughout the twentieth century), a large segment of the community— people of all ages and backgrounds—had the opportunity to reap the benefits of participating in these unique customs: psychological and social uplift, release and coping devices, acknowledgement and acceptance, and a shared spiritual connection to community and ancestral traditions. Funerals with music, labeled “jazz funerals” in recent decades, were a time-honored tradition and variation of social club parades. While the most-publicized twentieth-century jazz funerals were held in honor of deceased musicians, the majority of these ceremonies were given for members of benevolent societies and social aid and pleasure clubs. The funeral ceremony juxtaposed two different perspectives on death in the context of an open community celebration. After the religious service, a brass band (adorned in black suits) lined up outside the doors of the church or funeral home and played a slow, solemn dirge or hymn as the casket was placed into the hearse. Then began a procession led by an elaborately adorned grand marshal,

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followed by the band, social club members (also in black), the hearse, and finally the family (in funeral cars). As the procession proceeded, accompanied by a muted snare drum beat and more sad music, a crowd gathered and walked respectfully alongside. Slow mournful songs, like “Flee As A Bird” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” highlighted the sadness and sense of loss felt by family and friends. The solemnity of this part of the service was reflected in the music, which was characterized by preacherlike trumpet melodies, “amen” responses from other horns, shrill high note clarinet wails, and a gloomy death march pulse throughout. As the procession neared the cemetery or had proceeded for several blocks, the band lined both sides of the street and played one last dirge as the remaining procession passed through. This final public sendoff was called “cutting the body loose.” After the burial, or when the hearse and family were a respectable distance away (en route to the cemetery), then began a joyous celebration accompanied by lively up-tempo songs like “Oh, Didn’t He Ramble” and “When The Saints Go Marchin’ In” and “second line” dancing by the crowd. The ensuing procession lasted for several blocks—sometimes miles—in this final recollection of the deceased’s good time on earth. More importantly, this jubilant expression reflected a symbolic happiness because the dead person has attained the “ultimate freedom” from earthly burdens and has transitioned to a glorious union with the Creator. This is a New Orleans representation of the biblical reference to “rejoicing at death.” Religious community members—who sometimes avoided the frenzied, “sinful” social club events—were exposed to and participated in local music–related customs through a longstanding (but now virtually extinct) tradition of church parades. Held early on Sunday mornings to celebrate anniversaries and religious holidays, these Protestant (usually Baptist) processions had divisions of church members attired in white dresses and black suits. Brass bands played jazzed-up, lively versions of traditional hymns like “Lord, Lord, Lord” and “Bye and Bye” as church members and ministers strutted gracefully through otherwise quiet community streets. Here, the demonstration of strength, unity, and desire for freedom and social justice was acted out from the more solemn religious perspective of paying homage to and petitioning the Creator. Another unique New Orleans African American cultural tradition that developed during the turbulent post-Reconstruction period of the 1880s and continued into the 2000s was the Mardi Gras Indians. Self described as “gangs,” the Mardi Gras Indian tribes consisted of elaborately costumed blacks (predominantly males) who paraded through neighborhood streets on Mardi Gras and St. Joseph’s Day. The outward purpose of these groups was to pay homage to the Native American spirit of resistance and to recognize cultural and ancestral ties between the two races. In appearance, music, and procession style, the Mardi Gras Indians were actually expanding the local tradition of transformed West African–style celebrations seen at Congo Square and other locations. This was yet another poplar music-related custom that involved large segments of the black community through massive open attendance and participation. Most Indians were also from New Orleans’s lower-economic-level neighborhoods. Much time, money, and effort were spent preparing their boldly colored, breathtakingly beautiful costumes—all original creations that reflected traditional folk characters or individual statements. Several months of collective work from family and

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friends were necessary to produce each year’s cherished new suits made of feathers, beads, sequins, and other materials. Within the dozens of tribes—which had names like the Creole Wild West and the Golden Eagles—there were coveted positions, like the “big chief,” “wild man,” and “spy boy”—each carrying different levels of responsibility and degrees of honor and respect. In addition to preparing new costumes, other year-round activities, such as musical rehearsals and parading on special days, all contributed to a transformed existence in which pride, strength, respect, and nobility masked harsh everyday realities and difficult socio-economic conditions. So serious was the Mardi Gras Indian persona that deadly confrontations often resulted from random encounters of rival tribes on carnival day. Fortunately, modern day “battles” were of a friendlier nature, taking the form of competition for the most beautiful costume or the most skilled dancing. As they paraded through black neighborhoods, the Indians acted out a series of rituals through chanting, song, and dance. Special traditional Indian songs were sung in English and in unknown or secret dialects. Singing was accompanied by a “small band” of nonuniformed marchers, who used drums, tambourines and other percussion instruments to play long stretches of increasingly intense African-style polyrhythms. Indian dances were a series of West African–inspired movements and gestures, yet very different from “second line” dancing. Like social club parades and funerals, Mardi Gras Indian processions attracted large crowds of followers, who usually walked, clapped, and cheered along the entire route. These parades traditionally proceeded defiantly without legal permits over unplanned and improvised paths. Though traditional New Orleans–style jazz was the only musical form to actually originate in the Crescent City, the local musical heritage is also marked by stylistic diversity. A unique approach to singing, piano playing, drumming, and horn playing for the basis of a “New Orleans sound” has been transmitted into other more contemporary musical styles. This community has also produced distinctive local versions of other musical genres—such as rhythm & blues, funk, and hip-hop. These styles often reflect inspiration and influence from the vernacular music of brass bands, jazz, and Mardi Gras Indian traditions, especially in terms of rhythm, melodic phrasing, and conveying the local community spirit. Fats Domino, the Dixie Cups, the Neville Brothers, Allen Toussaint, Irma Thomas, Juvenile, Master P, and Lil Wayne are few of the local artists from the wellspring of New Orleans talent to garner national attention. A small modern jazz movement, fostered by saxophonist/producer Harold Batiste in the 1950s and 1960s, gained momentum after the 1980s through the efforts of performers/teachers like Ellis Marsalis, Alvin Batiste, and Edward “Kidd” Jordan. These men taught several of the current international stars of contemporary jazz—including Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Terrance Blanchard, Donald Harrison, and Nicholas Payton. Though not having as widespread community involvement and social significance as traditional jazz, social club parades and Mardi Gras Indians, other local musical genres are the products of the same environment of supportive family and community traditions in a culture where musical activities, creativity, and community celebrations are a way of life. No uniquely New Orleans style of religious music came to prominence; however, common Southern gospel forms were also influenced by the sound and spirit of local traditions in the city’s many vibrant Protestant church choirs. A strong family church

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tradition has produced many singers and musicians who performed only in religious settings or have had successful crossover careers in other genres. It is no coincidence that the rich environment of jazz and street parades of her hometown helped to nurture a young Mahalia Jackson (1912–72), who would go on to become “the world’s greatest gospel singer.” When considering the potential impact and implication of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans’s culture and traditions, one must recognize that the city and all of its customs (which evolved remarkably little throughout three-quarters of the twentieth century), had been undergoing a series of dramatic changes during the thirty years prior to the storm. Before Katrina, New Orleans music and culture found themselves in a state of transition in which commercialism and other changes had infused and transformed local traditions to the point that both authentic and generic styles existed together. In a popular, commercially oriented environment, the idea of “New Orleans music” came to mean many things to many people: local rhythm and blues, black traditional New Orleans jazz, modern jazz, Bourbon Street, brass bands, Dixieland, Cajun and zydeco music, Mardi Gras Indians, white rock groups, etc. Factors that affect lives across America—like computers, cell phones, cable television, video games, and other technological developments—have also affected local cultural traditions. Younger generations often approach concepts like tradition, race, culture, music, etc., from an understandably different perspective than their elders. Their thoughts, values, orientation, needs, views, and experiences are of a more modern world; they face different realities. Some younger African Americans do sense a uniqueness about being from New Orleans, but many are more in tune with the majority of American youth—and think more generically than regionally. Education, family background, and class differences affect the likelihood of participation in local traditions. Though some continue customs practiced by their ancestors for generations, others bypass those traditions and seek a “better life” and take advantage of “greater” opportunities. Contemporary inner-city social problems have had more than a “healthy” existence in the black New Orleans neighborhoods from which local traditions originated during the thirty years prior to Hurricane Katrina. In some ways, it is miraculous that one-hundred-year-old-plus folk traditions could remain alive and vital in a community in which drugs, murder, poor health, illegitimacy, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, urban decay, and other problems regularly rank among the worst in the nation. Like several other American cities, New Orleans saw a massive level of urban decay during the post–civil rights years; this was caused by diverse factors such as “white flight” to the suburbs, ineffective political leadership, corruption, indifference, failure to keep up public facilities and institutions, the Louisiana oil bust, incompetence, racism, and an seemingly unstoppable influx of illegal drugs and weapons into the black community. Race relations in New Orleans were, as always, a confusing mixture of genuine interaction and brotherhood, open and covert hostility, and a disturbing mutual tolerance or acceptance of the longstanding socioeconomic class structure and racial boundaries. Despite a 67-percent majority black population, significant progress in higher education and other areas, a rising black middle class, and the election of black mayors and other public officials beginning in the late 1970s, African

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Americans in New Orleans continued to retain a high level of poverty and a low level of business and economic power. A small number of prominent white families tightly retained control over much of the social, economic, and industrial condition of New Orleans. The imbalance of power is reflected by a static, poor, black labor force destined for menial service-industry jobs. Apathy, a breakdown of social and family values, and a poorly maintained public education system are factors that have continued to maintain the “status quo” and influence the direction of local traditions. A once-thriving and competitive school music program (often an indirect feeder to brass bands and other musical forms) has suffered greatly due to program and budget cuts, as well as an overall decay of the local public school system. Despite New Orleans’s continuing social problems and a decline of activities between the 1930s and early 1960s, all of the city’s black cultural traditions saw a period of transformation and renewal that brought them to the height of their popularity during the decades leading up to Hurricane Katrina. Beginning in the 1940s, a worldwide “revival” of interest in traditional New Orleans-style jazz led to the first authentic brass band recordings in the late 1950s. Though far from national best sellers, collections of this underground “traditional soul music” of black New Orleans (and subsequently the rituals and organizations around it) made it accessible to the outside world for the first time. One repercussive effect of the “revival” began in the early 1960s, when the brass bands, in particular Dejan’s Olympia Brass Band, were promoted as symbols of traditional jazz and New Orleans itself in the city’s growing tourist industry. The environment of hotels, conventions, tourists, and businessmen—vastly different from that of social clubs, ”second liners,” and neighborhood streets—resulted in a commercialization of brass bands that greatly altered their size, appearance, sound, and demeanor. Ironically, the outside success and visibility of a few brass bands—which came to include performances at major festivals, international travel, television and movie appearances, documentary films and high profile political engagements, helped to renew and inspire interest in brass bands within the black community. By the late 1970s, Mardi Gras Indians (and to a lesser degree social aid and pleasure clubs) began to make occasional appearances in the outside commercial arena. New economic possibilities, an ever-present local celebratory nature, and the homologous and static condition of many inner-city residents all contributed to a renaissance of community cultural traditions that continued into the early 2000s. Newer generations and current social conditions resulted in several changes in these traditions, which yielded both positive and negative effects. The most drastic, far-reaching change in local black musical traditions was the evolution and explosive growth of brass bands that began in the late 1970’s and has gained momentum since the 1980s. In addition to increased work opportunities for brass bands in the commercial and tourist industries, several other factors contributed to a new sound, look, and attitude in what can be called the “brass band revolution.” The deaths and retirements of older players, Sunday jazz brunches, increased travel by established groups, the rising cost of professional union musicians, a static traditional jazz repertoire, the heyday of a vibrant popular high school band tradition, the initiation of dozens of younger players into veteran trumpeter Ernest “Doc” Paulin’s popular nonunion brass band, and the efforts of legendary guitarist Danny Barker, who founded the

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first children’s brass band (Fairview) to help young people learn about their jazz heritage, were all important factors in causing this evolution. Many changes in society were reflected in the new wave of brass bands. Soon the traditional marches and repertoire, collective improvisation, uniforms, and some instrumentation were being replaced by T-shirts, street clothes, smaller groups (eight pieces or less), riffing horn sections, faster tempos, and bebop solos. The new sound was still “New Orleans,” but dominant overtones were not as much from “traditional jazz” as they were from a combination of rhythm and blues, modern jazz, and Mardi Gras Indian music. First the Dirty Dozen, then the Rebirth, and then a continuous flow of dozens of new, younger bands virtually replaced the few remaining traditional brass bands—both in the black community and the commercial world. By the early 1990s it had become as common for several competitive younger groups to gain international success as recording artists and night club acts, as well as to play stage shows and concerts, as it was for them to play for social club parades and funerals in the local black community. Some “retired” from community processions altogether in favor of more lucrative outside work. In 1986 the Rebirth Brass Band released a vocal/instrumental recording; “Do What Ya Wanna,” which became the first-ever brass band local radio hit and an enduring favorite at sports events, parties, weddings, Mardi Gras, and a host of other New Orleans festivities. In a sense, this song’s title, simple form, and hypnotic tuba riff signaled the spirit and direction of a new era of brass bands and community processions. The younger brass bands presented a steady repertoire of original songs and themes from various sources, which were converted into their modern style. Despite complaints from some older club members and brass band veterans that the newer groups’ music was too fast and frantic for the traditionally relaxed, medium tempo “second line” dancing, the competitive modern groups held a firm reign over most community street processions. The fresher contemporary sound, extremely casual appearance, and defiant attitude of change satisfied the youthful needs of self-expression and rebellious identity for new generations of social club members, “second liners,” and musicians throughout the decades leading to Katrina. Partly as a response to both community and commercial interests, a few semi-traditional brass bands were formed. These groups wore more conventional attire, but used instrumentation and a style that hovered between modern and classic brass bands. Another major change in New Orleans’s black cultural traditions during the years prior to 2005 was a significant increase in the membership and number of new social clubs and Mardi Gras Indian tribes on the streets. Many of the newer clubs seemed to have been organized primarily for “pleasure”–mainly parading—as most of the “social aid” activities and rituals of older clubs had disappeared. Some modern club parades were marred by overtly vulgar gestures, language, and behavior on the part of second liners, club members, and bands (which now also “sing” or “rap” in the streets). A new generation of Indians and tribes had initiated a number of changes that threatened to alter the purpose and meaning of that tradition. Some of the newer Indians seemed more interested in the idea of parading, marching, and having fun, as well as in the attention gotten from the community, than in the original meaning, purpose, symbolism, and nobility of the tradition. A few had begun to take shortcuts in the ritual of suitmaking by gluing instead of hand-sewing pieces of their

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costumes. Some had avoided the valued recognition of individual creativity and group effort altogether by paying others to completely make their suits. Other staples of Mardi Gras Indian tradition, like the symbolic march from “uptown” to a “downtown” meeting at a location called the “battlefield,” had been altered by some who removed their costumes, threw them in trucks and rode to the other side of town. No longer the exclusively black functions of earlier days, it had become common to see several white faces (often more bohemian transplants than white natives) dancing among the throng of “second liners” who follow social club and Indian parades. Random violence (nonracial)—ranging from robbery and assault to drug dealing and murder—had been an occasional, unwelcome, and unfortunate presence at some community processions since their earliest days. A small number of criminalminded individuals used the massive crowd cover and confusion to exact revenge or seize opportunities to commit illegal activities. These random individuals marred the celebration for the hundreds of participants who regularly came out to share and enjoy the events. At various periods, parade-related violence resulted in legislation and police actions that limited parade lengths and routes. Another major change among New Orleans’s black music–related traditions is seen in contemporary “jazz funerals” (often irreverently called “second lines” today). More frequent and popular than ever before, many funerals are dominated by a carnival or circus-like atmosphere consisting of family, friends, and band members wearing commemorative T-shirts or casual street clothes; fast music throughout; “second liners” who eat, drink, party, and behave disrespectfully; video and television cameras that disregard order and influence behavior; vendors selling drinks along the way; and several disturbing newer “rituals” like pouring beer over the casket and stopping the procession to stand the corpse up in a house to give final “tributes.” To many older community members and musicians, the time honored jazz funeral has largely degenerated into a mockery of what was once a spiritual, glorious, and majestic tradition. On some rare occasions, more traditional style “jazz funerals”—with conventional brass bands wearing black suits, slow dirges, and ceremonial dignity— can still be seen in community neighborhoods. A tragic sign of the times is that many funerals of recent decades are more likely to have been given for young victims of violent crime than for deceased older social club members or musicians. While the argument can be made that local social traditions and music have evolved to reflect the lifestyle and needs of today’s black community, necessary change has too often resulted in an overall decline of values, quality, integrity, symbolism, unity, professionalism, pride, purpose, and meaning—the essential, uplifting, community-strengthening characteristics upon which all of these traditions originated and were maintained. One of the more positive changes—perhaps as a more-controlled expression of “New Orleansness”–is that the tradition of “second line” dancing has found renewed popularity. Many local, mainly black weddings, parties and other celebrations (among all social classes) often have small brass bands at the end to bring these events to a frenzied climax. Several small “underground” neighborhood clubs (of varying degrees of longevity) also used modern brass bands that played long hours to jam-packed crowds of locals and visitors. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, nationally successful local rhythm and blues, funk, modern jazz, and hip hop artists—though popular—made only sporadic appearances

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at home due to an overabundance of talented regularly performing musicians and the lack of good pay, which is a reality for most New Orleans musicians of any genre. Many talented black musicians and singers performed regularly (sometimes exclusively) in the city’s vibrant Protestant church circuit of popular (mainly contemporary) gospel choirs, services, and musicals. The spirit of open acceptance, tolerance, flexibility, and a lax approach to rules— qualities that were initially essential to the creation and development of local musical traditions—also contributed to the formation of a “pseudo–New Orleans culture” in the years leading up to Hurricane Katrina. For much of their history, black New Orleans cultural traditions—except for the prototypical traditional jazz combos—existed almost in a vacuum; they were detached from many local whites and much of the black middle class and largely ignored by mainstream media, business interests, educational institutions, and city officials. When the already-popular tourism became the city’s main support industry, local government and business leaders were reminded that music and food were the main interests of visitors. Many popular Bourbon Street nightclubs featured fast, loud, slick, generic “Dixieland”— a commercialized, denatured (white) imitation of black New Orleans jazz that, though using similar instrumentation and repertoire, sounds and feels radically different. This rather bland and comic version of traditional jazz is often played by whites and some blacks who were less familiar and concerned with the more authentic black New Orleans jazz style. New Orleans soon saw a steady influx of mostly white American and foreign-born musicians who quickly established careers (sometimes very successfully) on the local scene. For many natives and transplants living in New Orleans pre-Katrina, the idea of “New Orleans music” had become more important than the actual music itself. An often-shifting and fabricated image of local musical traditions frequently served mainly as a means of financial gain. In a climate of little accountability or responsibility, many musicians, writers, media figures, businessmen, club owners, teachers, and politicians—often indifferent to or ignorant of the history and meaning of authentic black musical traditions—had become self-appointed arbitrators and dictators of “New Orleans culture.” As a result, much of what was presented as “authentic” and “traditional” New Orleans music, as well as some highly publicized “preservation” efforts, had little actual essence or relevance to perpetuating the city’s musical heritage. One example of this deception is how since the 1980s, movies and commercial interest have misled much of the world into believing that central Louisiana Cajun and zydeco are indigenous to the Crescent City. In truth, these musical styles are as foreign to native New Orleanians and local culture as are Tibetan wedding songs. One fact that is hardly recognized today is that since the deaths of remaining early-generation players during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, authentic black traditional New Orleans–style jazz is almost extinct. More often than not, most “traditional jazz” played by African Americans was a limited commercial repertoire played in a dominant mainstream rhythm and blues or modern jazz style that had little of the distinctive “New Orleans sound” and could be heard anywhere. A very small number of conscious players and descendants of jazz families have continued the more authentic style and sound of traditional New Orleans jazz, both in terms of performing a more “classic” repertoire and in using traditional jazz

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principles as the basis of new songs and creative expression. Far from a unified concept or direction of “New Orleans music” or “traditional jazz,” the local music scene was an evolving hodgepodge of different sounds and styles that had varying degrees of relevance to authentic black New Orleans traditions or their survival. One year after Hurricane Katrina caused flooding of 80 percent of New Orleans, leading to massive loss of life and property, the effect on the city’s unique longstanding black musical traditions and culture has potentially been devastating. More than half of the city’s total population—including a core of musicians, Mardi Gras Indians, and social club members—have lost loved ones, lost their homes, suffered severe losses of property, and remain displaced. Many neighborhoods that were alive with the sounds of brass bands and Mardi Gras Indian chants lie in ruins. Many New Orleanians have established lives in other cities. Others have returned and are struggling with rebuilding. Many others wish to return home but cannot, due to a lack of jobs, affordable housing, and basic services. Hundreds of thousands of New Orleans natives, both at home and abroad, cope with a variety of new and continuing Katrina-related hardships: housing, schools, health care, depression, stress, suicide, illness, death, unemployment, insurance companies, accidents, government agencies, displacement, loss of neighborhoods, and separation of families. It is difficult to put a price tag on or predict the total cultural losses that Katrina has brought to the black New Orleans area. While the more immediate threats to the amount of participants in, frequency of, and existence of social club parades, jazz funerals, and Mardi Gras Indian processions are obvious and measurable, other losses are immeasurable. This writer lost a valuable archive and collection of materials on New Orleans, Louisiana, and African American and African history, culture, and music; it consisted of thousands of rare, out-of-print, vintage, and original books, recordings, videos, and sheet music transcriptions, as well as new compositions, interviews, research, and photographs, plus vintage instruments and musical memorabilia, the sum of which rivaled and exceeded the collections of many local public libraries, university archives, and museums. More than a hidden, private stash of cultural treasures, this material was being actively used to promote and perpetuate authentic black New Orleans traditions in a number of ways through teaching, exhibits, special concerts, consulting, band development, new compositions using traditional styles, lectures, publications, et cetera. Many of these items were slated to become books, to be loaned to museums, to be the subjects of films, et cetera— which would have made a great contribution to the history, nature, and understanding of local music-related traditions from a rarely documented African American perspective. Several other musicians, photographers, writers, and filmmakers lost priceless and irreplaceable amounts of equipment and local cultural materials. Many New Orleans musicians have been scattered across the United States. Bands have been broken up. There is an increased difficulty in finding and hiring local musicians in New Orleans. Much of the work that supported musicians in New Orleans, including parades, clubs, funerals, conventions, jazz brunches, and house parties, is greatly diminished or has not yet returned. Several neighborhood bars have again begun to regularly feature small modern-style brass bands. One fortunate consequence of the worldwide attention placed on the disaster has been a temporarily renewed interest in New Orleans music—resulting in various international tours,

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television appearances, tribute concerts, and commemorative recordings—which has employed and reunited dozens of local musicians in various genres. Despite the devastation, displacement, and uncertainty that Katrina has brought, the irrepressible flame of ancestral traditions has not been completely extinguished. In addition to major commercial events like Mardi Gras and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, the spring of 2006 also saw the return of some local community traditions. A large, commemorative, traditional-style jazz funeral for Katrina victims and a massive all-club “second line” parade seemed to give the message that neither time nor nature would obliterate the spirit of the New Orleans black community. Some Indian tribes paraded on Mardi Gras. A number of other funerals and social club parades also took place. These positive signs of return and renewal mask a serious concern in the community that the city’s pre-Katrina masses of lowerincome African Americans are now in the way of “progress.” A common fear is that a conglomeration of businessmen, land developers, and politicians seeks to capitalize on the city’s post-hurricane climate of mass destruction, confusion, and displacement. Some believe that several means are being employed to discourage residents from returning and to create a chaotic environment in which the takeover of black neighborhoods would seem a viable and welcome solution. Some view nationally broadcast signs of renewal as part of the deception. They feel that contrived and limited aspects of recovery are intentionally overblown in an effort to reduce widespread concern—by giving the false impression that most of New Orleans is back to normal. Many fear that current proposals for rebuilding and redevelopment would turn the city into a caricature of itself: a fabricated “pseudo-New Orleans” in which genuine culture and community would be replaced by a Disneyland or Las Vegas-type atmosphere designed for mass tourist and commercial consumption. Those who express concern about the survival of the local black community and its musical traditions cite steady, quiet, pre-Katrina urban regentrification; the current slow progress of rebuilding efforts; questionable political actions on all levels; and recent tensions between parading community organizations and city government (and police) as signs of impending trouble. Just months before Katrina, popular big chief Allison “Tutti” Montana collapsed and died in the city council chambers while protesting police harassment of Indians during a St. Joseph’s Day procession. In the spring of 2006, the city council used recent shootings at community parades as the motivation behind levying a prohibitive increase of nearly 400 percent in the parade tax for social clubs. Though the Black Men of Labor club began the September 2006 social club parade season on the streets with a full membership of thirty-six, several other clubs cannot afford the fee and will not parade. It is hard to predict what long-term effects the combined actions of prolonged displacement, the post-Katrina climate, and city government will have on the survival and direction of local black traditions. While some may see the hurricane as a welcome opportunity for ethnic and demographic restructuring, the disaster has also brought about the potential for a major renaissance of local black music-related traditions and their more positive aspects. The survival and future of local traditions depends on several factors—some beyond the control of man. First, no matter what is or isn’t done to restore people, culture, and landscape, ultimately New Orleans’s current geographic reality is a risky

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and uncertain future to be determined by the random whims of nature. Toxicity of the environment, the threat of more frequent and severe hurricanes, an inadequate and weakened levee system, steady city-wide land sinkage, a powerful Mississippi River fighting to run a more natural course, and a continuously eroding Louisiana coastline, are all realities that many simply will not face. For various reasons, many citizens have decided to live off of hope, prayer, and the belief that Katrina was a once-in-a-lifetime event. Some point out that millions worldwide choose to live in areas that have constant threats from tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters. For local traditions to survive, New Orleans needs a concerted effort by leaders in city government, business, and industry to decide how to bring people back or allow those who wish to come back home to do so. More than accepting and expecting a return to the deplorable socio-economic conditions of preKatrina, citizens would need better and adequate housing, jobs, pay, education, sanitation, health care, and basic services. Effective and realistic ways need to be sought to attack problems like drugs, crime, and black-on-black violence, which— although they are major national problems—have recently returned to New Orleans in epidemic proportions. Ultimately, the will and spirit of the people will help determine how, if at all, local neighborhoods and vernacular musical traditions will return. Thousands of citizens are struggling with thoughts of returning to a damaged, compromised city with an uncertain future. Many indicate that they have begun lives and found better opportunities and conditions elsewhere. Among those that have returned, confusion, anger, and frustration resulting from the slow rebuilding process and continued discomfort caused by present conditions have not yet revealed how much of the neighborhoods’ family traditions, collective community spirit, and interest in previous musical practices will return. New Orleans is a wounded city with a wounded community. The healing process will take much time. One thing is certain: the next several years will be an important defining period in the cultural history of New Orleans. There is a tremendous opportunity for native descendants and concerned citizens not to allow their history and culture to be washed away. It is an opportunity for all people to come together for the common good. It is a chance to do away with the widespread and divisive clannish mentality that for too long has limited growth and progress in many areas. It is a chance to use New Orleans’s most significant contribution—jazz—as a central component of rebuilding and improving the city. In order for that to happen, a serious, honest, introspective self-examination needs to be directed by both citizens and civic leaders concerning the state of local jazz culture. A massive effort needs to be undertaken to better educate the general public, and especially business, political, and educational leaders, about the little-known history, meaning, style, values, importance, and socioeconomic potential of jazz. With that in mind, many common myths and attitudes need to be brought forth and examined, especially by those in important decision-making positions. The selection of decision makers in the cultural arena needs to be carefully done and based on more reliable criteria than favoritism and popularity. The community as a whole needs to understand that while it is good to feature a variety of musical styles, the majority of visitors expect to find the only musical style that originated in New

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Orleans—traditional New Orleans jazz. A major emphasis should be placed on presenting and promoting more authentic and artistically relevant traditional music from the wide spectrum of classic jazz, “revival” styles, and creative new traditional music, in addition to the usual commercial fare. A serious look needs to be taken at how other cities—with less indigenous culture, authentic traditions and talent—have built tremendously successful musicbased economies. A delicate balance between authenticity and commercial interests should be of central importance. A number of harmful, longstanding myths about local jazz need to be exposed and explored in an effort to more honestly and realistically make assessments. We can no longer afford to let fame, self-promotion, and deception become easy ways for those who pimp and fake involvement in the authentic jazz tradition. It has been common among most previous decision makers to be oblivious to facts like these: Most music teachers and many musicians are not experts or trained in jazz. Many harbor negative attitudes toward it, especially traditional jazz. Most don’t realize that different jazz styles are like different languages, and a knowledge of and proficient performance base in one style does not usually translate into expertise in other jazz forms. Many do not understand that under the umbrella of what is labeled “traditional jazz” in New Orleans are several different styles and approaches that have varying degrees of relevance to the authentic New Orleans jazz sound or tradition. At the risk of upsetting favoritism, political correctness, and indifference, which have governed many local culture-based selections and decisions of the past, a more responsible ethic marked by authenticity, knowledge, and accountability needs to be implemented to educate, develop, and promote genuine local talent in the area of traditional jazz music. When considering the future of the descendants of local black musical traditions, one must question the possible effectiveness of nonnatives and specialists in other genres and their motives for taking positions of dictating local cultural policies and dominating some performance activities. One influential foreign musician, who made a successful career off of black traditional jazz musicians and serves on a policy-making board, candidly expressed his feelings this way: “I don’t give a damn about no culture. I just came here for the music. Hell, if I wanted culture, I’d have stayed in Europe.” The original style of New Orleans jazz as handed down from the generation of Buddy Bolden is often misunderstood and unjustly labeled as “dated period music” that has little musical or cultural value in today’s world. In reality, both the style of jazz and its principles can be used for new creative expression. It can also serve as a powerful metaphor in the rebuilding and future of New Orleans. Very often, good authentic, traditional jazz still proves itself to be an exciting, danceable, and spiritually satisfying music to countless varied audiences worldwide. It should be viewed and treasured as the “classical music” of New Orleans. Jazz is a collective style based on a combination of teamwork and individual creative expression. It transforms conventional reality into a series of new ideas and possibilities. Jazz can be used in a number of ways to address social and economic issues. Traditional New Orleans jazz needs to be taught in public and private schools by qualified individuals. For the youth, jazz can be an inroad to learning everything from local history and racial harmony to a team-oriented set of values like those associated

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with sports. Traditional jazz music can offer more easy access to early travel and employment opportunities than the more competitive and less open popular music fields. In many parts of the world, more authentic black New Orleans style jazz remains as a popular “cult” music performed in clubs and churches and at festivals. Those destined for other styles of music could gain the advantage of acquiring extra and special melodic and rhythmic instincts by having some experience with local traditions. Not everyone will become jazz musicians, but exposure to the field can lead to other employment possibilities in a much-needed local music business support system: entertainment attorneys, music writers and journalists, teachers, nightclub operators, recording technicians and manufacturers, musical instrument sales and repair specialists, et cetera. At the very least, the history and value system of jazz could offer young people positive ancestral connections and a sense of pride, selfworth, and accomplishment. It could also serve as an inspiration for achieving individuality and mobility in many areas of life. In this regard, jazz could become one possible deterrent to youthful unemployment, crime, and despair. New Orleans has a new opportunity to become a standout in the tourist industry by setting a higher standard of offerings based on authentic local traditions. A cultural district or center with museums, performance venues, and retail outlets, largely jazz related, could be established. Regular promotional mini-festivals of jazz and interactive events could be sponsored and promoted by local government. Ways should also be found to reestablish and improve neighborhoods conducive to cultural traditions. More African Americans must learn to value and recognize jazz and other aspects of their unique cultural heritage. Recognition of the post-Katrina threat to the survival of local music-related traditions has led to some promising new developments. For the first time, members of several younger groups have expressed interest in learning about the history, style, and repertoire of early jazz and brass bands. They have engaged in a number of workshops and concerts with members of more traditional-style groups. Both younger and older musicians involved in these collaborations demonstrate a renewed and heightened recognition of the value of heritage and tradition. They are coming together with the intention of learning, preserving, and passing on authentic New Orleans music to future generations, as well as infusing it with new life. In a positive and timely fashion, two African American universities, Xavier and Dillard (both badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina), have resumed a series of recently established programs that highlight local musical and cultural traditions. In addition to helping to document, preserve, and promote jazz and local vernacular customs, these efforts also serve as a way to bring together various groups from the community. While racism cannot be completely eliminated, realistic solutions to deal with issues of race and economic structure should be sought. More whites must share economic opportunities and not be threatened by the idea of positive black self-promotion. Asian, Hispanic and other cultures use and celebrate their cultural heritage in positive ways without the perception of being hostile, militant, or anti-white. Jazz promotes a democratic construct characterized by acceptance, unity, cooperation, and a celebration of differences. Another optimistic development in Katrina’s aftermath has been the appearance of several dedicated white and black individuals,

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groups, churches, and organizations who are spending considerable time, money and effort to aid and assist all elements of the New Orleans cultural community. This positive demonstration of humanity should serve as inspiration for the community as a whole. Everyone needs to recognize the real possibilities of losing jazz and the cultural traditions around it, without which New Orleans simply would not be New Orleans. Many important questions concerning the survival of one of America’s most culturally rich and diverse cities will remain unanswered for years to come. Will an injured New Orleans culture become a victim of “progress,” greed, ignorance, and Hurricane Katrina? Can the city overcome its many problems and rebuild and restore its traditional neighborhoods, community bonds, and local spirit? What shape and direction will the future Crescent City take? Will it become a community that is authentic, fabricated, or ethnically restructured? Will New Orleans lose its “soul”? As several hundred thousand citizens struggle for survival in a limbo of continuing problems, unanswered questions, and uncertain futures, one can only wonder if the sad, sweet dirges or happy, dancing melodies of a recent authentic, traditional jazz funeral foreshadowed certain death or a glorious resurrection.

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HERO, EULOGIST, TRICKSTER, AND CRITIC: RITUAL AND CRISIS IN POST-KATRINA MARDI GRAS CHELSEY LOUISE KIVLAND

The way everybody is looking at Mardi Gras 2006 here, it’s sort of the communities planting the flag in the ground saying, “We’re back!” —Stephen Perry, President, New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau

The year 2006 marks the 150th anniversary of Mistik Krewe of Comus’s parade, in which hooded club members, born of New Orleans’s most elite families, paraded on horseback down crowded streets, founding Mardi Gras of New Orleans. Mardi Gras 2006, where exclusive clubs now parade on papier-mâché floats while throwing cheap charms to a crowd shouting “Give me beads!” also marks nearly six months since Hurricane Katrina claimed thousands of lives and displaced many more in its wake. Performing an intricate web of social unions and exclusions through the cultural costume of carnival, Mardi Gras 2006 manifested familiar tensions between tradition and change, where somewhere between the quotation of its past and the foreboding of its future lay the (re-)invention of the city of New Orleans, its relationality and politics, communities and power, which comprise, in their embodied performance, the city’s “agora.” The becoming of this agora—as it emerged at the intersection of the ritual of Mardi Gras; the orchestrated performance of Carnival rites; and the crisis, the critical social change, of Hurricane Katrina—is the focus of this essay. To foster appreciation of this complex intersection, I explore how different communities addressed the crisis through their ritual performances. The disparate forms through which the crisis was given presence or absence, voice or silence, within the

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ritual performances demonstrated a politics of representation for the reclamation of divergent histories of the event and, accordingly, of communities’ practical orientations to (and through) them. Indeed, each performance demonstrated a community’s struggle to reconcile the past with the ominous future. Yet, seen collectively, the ritual performances played against each other to compete for the authority to assert a particular form of reconciliation. While each historical representation assuaged the crisis’s impact within a community, the interplay of the representations fortified the very tensions that the crisis unleashed. Four pivotal performances during the post-Katrina Mardi Gras, observed during my participation as a spectator, will serve as the basis of my exploration.1 They are: (i) the “Rex” parade, a predominantly white social club, or krewe, founded in 1872 and comprised of the city’s elite businessmen, which stands as the culmination of the festival, where the “King of Carnival” is crowned; (ii) the “Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club” parade, a predominantly black working class club, founded in 1909, which is the most popular parade and precedes the Rex parade; (iii) the “T-shirt brigades,”2 groups of ten or more black men who, wearing satirical T-shirts, march through the crowds along the parade routes; and (iv) the “unofficial parades,” groups of young people of various racial backgrounds who stand atop flatbed trucks or gather on foot and perform in unofficial festival areas. These four performances constitute communities of performance, a categorization that designates the momentary solidification of actions and affect by performers and audience. Describing each community in terms of their concerted social action highlights how the designation of ascribed features (e.g., race, class, gender) obliges the performance of membership. COMMUNITIES

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To enter the scene of the post-Katrina Mardi Gras is to inhabit a complex space of performance, but to grasp its social significance one must locate within this space the play of potent symbols. My descriptions of the four performances illustrate the particular exchange of discourse, actions, and objects that gave rise to four mythic personalities: the “hero” in the Rex parade, the “eulogist” in the Zulu parade, the “trickster” in the T-shirt brigades, and the “critic” in the unofficial parades. If the mythic personalities are read as performative representations of the communities, these personalities constitute, following Durkheim, the totemic incarnations of the communal consensuses generated through performance.3 The mythic personality, as totem, is the tangible symbol that represents each community’s collective feelings regarding the crisis by consolidating a “shared past” and a “rallying cry” for the future.4 Constructed through the communal ritual performance, it is a living symbol in a double sense: its enactment is as much the sign of a mythic personage as its embodiment is the myth itself. This duality means that the embodied totem carries both the meaning of the representation (e.g., King) and the confines of the one who enacts it (e.g., the white man is king). The symbolic assemblage that makes the representation and the assemblage that makes up the social body construct the mythic personality. Hence, the performers—and also, crucially, those to whom they are performing directly (audience) and indirectly (beholders)—actively signified the

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symbols used to covey each community’s relation to the crisis. Though both groups vitally participated in shaping the totems, the audience was “seeing with” the performers, entering the community of performance, whereas the beholders were “seeing against” the performance, distancing this community from their own. Rex Parade: The Hero The King of Carnival, Rex, parades as the culminating event of Mardi Gras Day with his “court” plucked from the city’s elite white men and his queen selected from the city’s “leading debutantes.” Rex is adorned with a crown set atop a faux white wig and beard that accents a gold-trimmed white velour robe, while his young queen wears a gold dress with a large feathered crown and his court “maskers” wear hooded velour costumes of green, purple, and gold, the royal colors. Their premier float proclaims their theme: “Beaux Arts and Letters.” Icons of Jazz and Blues remain largely absent, as the figures of white, male authors and artists hearken the embedded “civility” of Rex’s full name: “The School of Design.” The next float’s banner announces “Renew Orleans” alongside the parade’s motto, “Pro Bono Publico.” Winding through city center, the parade shields itself from the eyesores of Hurricane Katrina. Their throws meet the hands of two tiers of spectators: elite families who, waving signs of their affiliations in the parades, collect the signature throws—fat stuffed-animal goats that symbolize the boeuf gras—from constructed platforms atop rented street space; and a mixture of local and tourist communities, which, segregated by race and class, vie for “good spots” on the street space between the stands. When the last float, which bears the insignia “Dignity and Strength,” passes, the parade pauses before Gallier Hall for a moment of silence to honor, as King Logan made clear, “what [not who] has been lost and to recognize those who have given so much to help the city survive and rebuild.” After Rex raises a toast to the black mayor of the predominantly black city, C. Ray Nagin, the maskers signal the end of the parade to scarcely visible authorities and are escorted by police to their gala housed at the local Marriot alongside hundreds of evacuees. Against the exodus of pedestrians, a fierce panorama of black graffiti on boarded-up storefronts surfaces across the empty trolley tracks: “U LOOT, WE SHOOT.” And soon all that is left is the thick accumulation of waste in the eerie silence of the sparsely populated city. The hero, White argues, when cast as the protagonist of a historical narrative, is the romantic avenger who embodies “transcendence over the world of experience,” a victory over the forces of nature.5 This transcendence is made possible by bravery in the face of a danger and a gallant design to overcome it. Similarly, the final declaration to the spectators, “Dignity and Strength,” constitutes the heroic transcendence of the Rex parade in the face of crisis: to renew their ritual and their city. As an embodied declaration, this semantic pairing is a claim to the manner of strength and strength of manner that will usurp the social unsettlement and physical damages of Hurricane Katrina. The parade’s enactment of a kinship between the thematic statement of civility and the honors it bestows expressed the performers’ claim to a dignified social status. The cultural exaltation of royal culture concealed the parade’s racially segregationist practices by eliding the language of race for that of civility. Ornamental

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costumes and court practices hearkened back to the cultural authority, as opposed to class status, of their imagined colonial descendents, while the selection of authors in “Beaux Arts and Letters” solidified this authority. Hence, the parade presented evidence that the elite’s ability to rebuild the city is owed to their superior culture rather than economic, racial hegemony. This intimation echoed the original parade, which, debuting a decade before emancipation, embraced the theme “Milton’s Paradise Lost,” a civilly disguised attempt to wrest control of the city from the “demon actors” (i.e., slaves) soon to “upset our way of life.”6 Seen against the backdrop of the aggressive graffiti, the awakening of this heritage highlights how the hurricane ignited colonial appeals to civility as a master trope with which to define racial groups and justify their social positions within the city. Finally, the spatial demarcations revealed an inextricable bond between the economic and cultural exchanges used to define the community of performance, the performers, and the audience. Opposed to the obstructed street space, the elevated street stands translate the performance into a private event that can only be fully appreciated from this view above the chaos. Through signaling affiliation, the parade implicated certain viewers into the ancestral line of the Rex court and its just rewards, whether cultural pride, beads, or a good view. In this way, the parade suggested an exclusive community built on the performance of a shared history. Furthermore, by separating their chivalrous performance from the eyesores of Hurricane Katrina, Rex and court substitute the damaged reality of New Orleans with an image of their common power “to show what we can do,” metonymically referencing New Orleans’s power as a city. Exemplifying this common power, their moment of silence, taken at Gallier Hall, where Jefferson Davis lies in state, and dedicated to lost property and rebuilding efforts, revealed the maskers’ ability, as heroes, to rebuild the city as before. The maskers also exhibited their strength through their control of the city. In the face of nearly disbanded civil services, the parade laid bare the mayor’s civic acknowledgement of and acquiescence to the commercial elite. Not only was the Rex parade able to have a police escort despite the untended, crowded streets, but they were also able to hold their performance of waste despite the city’s crippled sanitation infrastructure. This latter act, which transformed their performance of excess into the accumulation (not expenditure) of waste, boldly emphasized the present neglect of the dire situation in the city.7 Dignity and strength gave form to the task of recovery by substantiating the declared wish of the Rex parade “to ‘Renew New Orleans’s for the ‘public good.’” However, while the members of Rex demonstrated their imperviousness to the graver consequences of the hurricane, the embedded contradictions of their wish revealed themselves. For renewal, as a remaking of what came before, vividly dissimulated and dismissed the needs and desires of the very public they claimed to aid. All three of the other performances would uniquely highlight this contradiction. Zulu Parade: The Eulogist Begun as a lending organization, Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club parades before Rex along a notably different path. Donning thick blackface with white outlines around the mouth and eyes and outfitted in “primitive African attire” of grass skirts, zebra print belts, and large afros, Zulu thrusts its theme banner draped across the

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lead float—“Zulu Leading the Way Back Home”—to the crowds awaiting Rex at city center. “Authentic Zulu warriors” who traveled from Africa and performed before the parade obstruct the lead float, asserting the equivocal hope of the parade’s claim: Toward which home? The third float confirms this question, as it reads, “9th Ward, Gentilly,” a memorial for the neighborhoods lost. Close behind, last year’s king and queen stand, with their golden sashes but without crowns, before the word “Reunion.” They wait “till all our family is home” before a “real reign” can begin. With a final wave to city officials, Zulu begins its second route. Ordered to dismount their floats in this “ghostly territory,” the maskers mark the first official steps of revelers beyond city center. Accompanied by marching bands, they tread through their neighborhoods in the fashion of a “second line,” the New Orleans–style jazz funeral. Here is a vast crowd of predominantly black families, who stand atop the dirt of now vacant plots of land with arms reaching anxiously for Zulu’s—and indeed Mardi Gras’—most “prized throws” of hand-painted coconuts. The throws portray images ranging from the standard “Z” insignia to pictures of people in acts of prayer and carpentry. Contrary to the Rex parade, Zulu pauses for silence abreast the Convention Center, where crowd and maskers have gathered to “cut the body loose.” Following this tribute to the individuals who awaited accommodation and rescue in a crowed pool of bodies, waste, and darkness, the music takes an upbeat turn, dancing resumes, and the party really “comes home.” There are two intertwined responsibilities of a eulogist: to honor the deceased and in so doing to restore the spirits of the living. By tying together the acts of mourning and festivity, of “cutting loose” and “coming home,” the performance of Zulu personified the mythic eulogist. The intricate interplay of this duality, shifting constantly through the parade, facilitated for the community of performance the wish of reunion that the maskers proclaimed. This initial duality of emotion occurred in the parade’s first scenes with the thematic declaration of Zulu’s initiated homecoming and the tribute to lost neighborhoods. The juxtaposition captured the “need to honor the missing and honor those who must keep going.” The absence of new royalty continued this theme with its demonstration that full restoration of the Zulu community necessitates the presence of those displaced. Echoing practices of ritual regicide, the dethroned old king and queen appeared here as effigies holding the tiers of the hierarchy in place until successors could be named and the devotees returned.8 The most forceful demonstration, however, occurred in the parade’s enactment of a second line through the damaged areas. This act undoubtedly communicated the mournful burial of all that has been lost: the homes, livelihoods, and lives. Yet, in the full tradition of second line, the joyful music and dancing accented the funeral as a burial of the crisis itself, where it no longer would haunt the present. Such exorcism within the scene of abandoned neighborhoods was remarkably vivid in the maskers’ memorial throws, which articulated the sequence of custom, cleansing, and change constitutive of the traditional funeral. Indeed, festivities fully surged only after the final parting gesture of the funeral, “cutting the body loose,” an occurrence that exemplified the role of the eulogist: to simultaneously honor the dead and revitalize the living. Through uses of racially coded symbols, such as stereotypical costumes of African warriors, the parade designated the homebound community. A young black man,

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when asked about the seemingly offensive use of such stereotypical allusions to African “savagery” after the crisis’s exposure of the city’s unconscionable racialized oppression, clarified the complex message of this costume: “You know, they’re making fun of white people.” The reappropriation of the stereotype was plainly visible in the performance: the real Zulu warriors, referencing the ancestral strength of the black community, figuratively positioned a cultural home, one that outlasts the devastation of property in their territorial home. Suggesting a pride in the cultural separation of the races, the glorification of this stereotype performatively challenged the degradation of black culture in the city, especially salient in the conflation of poor, black people with criminals in the rumors of violence following the storm.9 For this reason, the intensified allusion to Africa in 2006 not only indexed its historical use as an unthreatening mask that avoids the scrutiny of elites by accommodating their stereotype, but also communicated the fragility of this stereotype by exhibiting its equivocal meanings.10 Indeed. Zulu performed the ineptitude of those—the maskers of “whiteness” beneath the blackface—who promulgate such stereotypes, challenging the authority of Rex parade’s claim that the city’s rebirth lay in their hands. Acting as a strategic dual emasculation, the performance’s hyperbolic caricatures of race attenuated the elite’s backlash and their power, the interpretation of which depends, as the young man clarified, on who is watching.

T-SHIRT BRIGADES: THE TRICKSTER Though most audience members dress in costumes, one occurrence renders itself especially salient in its mass and its deviations from the parade audience containing it. From the end of the main thoroughfare of the parades, an oncoming group of ten or more black men walking in uneven, but discernible lines with a steady, measured beat approaches the crowds of the mainline parades. The coordinated “black mob,” as one beholder calls it, moves against the stationary, mostly white crowds of tourists and locals, drawing the attention of all those they pass over and around. Long after the disruption passes, the striking commentary of the T-shirts that each marcher wears remains. Their white T-shirts boldly display the words “Willy Nagin and the Chocolate City, Semi-Sweet and a Little Nuts” surrounded by the mayor digitally rendered in the costume of “Willy Wonka,” complete with cane, top hat, and threepiece suit. This satire thrown in the face of the crowds seeking to forget the crisis welcomes the convulsions of shock, laughter, and shouts; “That’s just wrong!” is heard long after they have turned the corner. Awaiting the parades, the crowds are passed by two more brigades. One wears black shirts with a white machine gun encircled by the words “Battle of New Orleans 2005,” and another the picture of a plasma TV to the side of which is an old-fashioned scroll that reads, “I escaped Hurricane Katrina. . .with nothing but a Land Rover, New Plasma TV. . . .” Aside from condemnations, one repeatedly hears the outcry, “Where did they get those?” Identifying the role of the trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara in Yoruba mythology, Gates states, “tricksters are mediators and their mediation is tricks.”11 He argues, drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of “double-voicedness,” that tricksters join disparate discourses through two technologies of trickery, parody and the hidden polemic.

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Bakhtin suggests that in parody the “author employs the speech of another, but introduces into that speech an intention which is directly opposed to the original one.”12 The author of the hidden polemic, in contrast, “brings a polemical attack against another speech act, another assertion, on the same topic” without adopting another’s speech.13 In their double-voiced speech, the T-shirt brigades mediated the contradictory discourses of tragedy and comedy to produce a satire of the vices and follies of Hurricane Katrina. Their trick was, in the “Willy Nagin” shirt, accomplished through parody, but a new trick emerged in the other shirts, “I escaped Hurricane Katrina” and “Battle of New Orleans,” through the combination of parody and hidden polemic; a possibility generated by mass mediated coverage of the crisis. The “Willy Nagin” shirt stole the speech of the mayor, who infamously compared in a public address the masses of black bodies wading through floodwaters in the days following the breach of the levees to a “chocolate city.” By parodying this comment, the tricksters altered the dire state of the victims to a joke, protecting the dignity of those so labeled. This act also gained the force of condemnation by questioning the black mayor’s affiliation with the black community. The shirts mocked the authority of the mayor, as a high-status black man, to speak for the majority of poor, black residents in the city, bringing attention to not only the racist but also classist connotations of his comment. The other two shirts deployed trickery straddling parody and hidden polemic by taking full advantage of unauthorized speech. Following White’s apt description of rumor, this “ghost speech,” as speech belonging to everyone and no one, subverted the accusatory rumors applied to the stranded victims of Hurricane Katrina by asserting that their deeds were valorous acts.14 Because the national media promulgated such accusations without verification, heightening the event’s sensationalism, the act, described as a “polemic of valor,” subverted the accusations of a mass of potential authors. The beholders’ fierce condemnations reacted against the trickster’s embodied suggestion that the shirt’s message was directed at all of them, as each potentially voiced the original accusation. To resignify the tragic with the comedic in a satirical appropriation of the plight and accusation of the victims of the crisis was the wish of the trickster. Their control of this appropriation, accomplished by their independent, occult production of the shirts and by the symbolic value of their bodies, empowered the tricksters against those satirized. Since the maskers were exclusively black, their acts were not general comments crafted by all for the comedic release of all. Rather, the accusations targeted those not included in the original accusations, those not socially defined as black and poor, as “looters” or “wading bodies.” Confronting the predominantly white beholders, the trickster laid the final trick in defining the performance community through their ability to pull off the joke, as a white man commented, “I could never get away with that.” Unlike the other parades, the trickster combined the symbols of ritual and crisis by questioning tourism as a means to restore the city. T-shirts are the characteristic souvenir of tourists, and Mardi Gras is the quintessential event for which tourists come. Using the T-shirt to deliver a crass joke—one exceeding “good fun”— mocked the city as a venue for tourism. More pointedly, the T-shirts ridiculed the use of the crisis as an opportunity for a value-added Mardi Gras experience, shown in bus tours of the destruction or the cottage industry of trinkets inscribed with “Katrina slogans”

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(e.g., “I survived Katrina”). The trickster’s act of ridicule, though suggestive of the problematic relation between the hurricane and Mardi Gras, was given the valence of critique in the unofficial parades.

UNOFFICIAL PARADES: THE CRITIC A walk to the parade outskirts meets the “hidden carnival.” The floats of main parades have passed, the bead cries die, and loud political chants—“What do you want?” “Levees!”— crescendo. As the performers appear, their distinctiveness declares itself. Groups of revelers of various racial backgrounds wear outfits redolent of the mainline parades, but with a tinge of mockery, for in place of crowns and velour are cone-shaped heads and frilly satin suits. They stand atop flatbed trucks between posters emblazoned with messages that mock the festival of Mardi Gras by relating it to Hurricane Katrina. “Beads for Sandbags?” calls out from a disordered mass of bodies, posters, and frills. Openly contesting the parade tradition, the floats do not pass, but confront the street beholders who are walking toward the main parades. Their throws of political messages inscribed on strips of scrap or toilet paper mostly land in the palms of other revelers on the same float or one nearby. Another set of revelers interweave between these flatbeds; on their bodies hang creative amalgamations of Hurricane Katrina and Mardi Gras. Two white male rollerbladers protested the work of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) by wearing a bird costume made of blue tarp that urges, “FUCK FEMA”; six black men display a sandwich board with a scene depicting the stranded victims of the storm and the phrase, “It’s No Party Here”; and two white men hold plywood tagged with a city map, the outer ring of which reads, “Tourists Welcome!” Close together, these performers march through the flatbeds, paying no attention to others in the streets. A critic is one who pronounces judgment—not official evaluation, but public commentary—on others’ actions or statements. Standing on the margin of the festivities, the unofficial parades made contact with revelers en route, yet were distanced from the legal sanctions of the ordered parades (e.g., street permits and authorized throws). Both sets of unofficial parades, the flatbed groups and the street performers, performed an exclusive exchange of symbols that defined their critical community against other revelers by protesting the tropes of Mardi Gras and Hurricane Katrina. The flatbed groups, by throwing actual waste (e.g., toilet paper) and political chants, and the street performers, by bodying forth denigrations, announced an evaluation of this Mardi Gras and the action to follow from this evaluation. Such gestures urged the beholders to evaluate the festival as an untimely performance of waste and to focus efforts on the physical and social damages from Hurricane Katrina. When costumed in the carnivalesque, the critic emerges, Bakhtin suggests, within a momentary suspension of established custom through the medium of masquerade. Carnival allows the “lowly peasant” to mask the elite and play with their privileged customs, temporarily inverting the social order.15 “Carnival,” he states, “celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order; it marks the

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suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.”16 In so doing, carnival opens a domain of “freedom” where communication becomes “directed at everyone,” severing hegemonic relations by furnishing the people’s “ancestral body.”17 However, this assertion has been shown to exaggerate the extent to which Carnival produces effective critics of established social order. As Turner notes, though the carnivalesque performs reversals of social roles, it is dependent on a set of rules and regulations that ultimately disabuses such reversals.18 In this reading, the uninhibited reversal within Carnival presents ambiguity and contradiction within social relationships, but within “a structure of order” that ultimately projects the instability of this temporary space of play.19 Carnival’s acts of masquerade are redressed by the rules that allow them to exist; the performed fragility of the “ancestral body” makes desirable the social privileges and prohibitions that keep this body controlled. In New Orleans’s Carnival, though excessive libation and promiscuity take place on Bourbon Street, the Bakhtinian ideal of carnival has been virtually silenced by authoritative regulation. Since 1857, when “Krewe of Comus” decided to “control the disgraceful actions of the ruffians,” Mardi Gras has not been a release from regimented life.20 Demonstrated through officially ordered parades and forceful relegation of the public audience, Mardi Gras is a tightly controlled affair. Yet this regulation never completely silences the expression of social tensions; rather, it imparts to the critiques a fleeting and measured existence, which transforms play into an institution upholding city’s social “rank and order.” An explanation of why the role of the critic intensified in the post-Katrina Mardi Gras emerges from the social instability and ambiguity that Hurricane Katrina exposed. The catastrophic effects of the event mirrored the ritual of Mardi Gras, for it put established norms of social life in flux. But crucially, the crisis disobeyed the ritualized rules of destruction and construction, leaving “undressed” the betweenness of order and disorder. By challenging the ability of the ritual to complete its redressive sequence in the face of the city’s social liminality, the crisis “denatured” the symbolic structure of the ritual. It opened a new space where the symbols of ritual and crisis could be arranged in novel ways to critique social relations. Indeed, as two signs on flatbeds stated: “Rex Drowned” and “Guess who is Rex now?” By taking advantage of this liminal state, the performances of the unofficial parades exposed a critique of the social relations that produced the very catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, including the ineptitude of governmental organizations (e.g., FEMA), lack of state and federal support, the media’s exaggerated emphasis on crime, and the neglect of revelers. This polemic was fronted with the aid of the carnivalesque, which referenced costumes of beads and capes and behaviors of partying and tourism, and used the ritual as a medium to highlight the catastrophic effects of poverty on the victims and the still untended exigencies of the city. Such use served to denigrate Mardi Gras as, again, an exclusive, inopportune, wasteful party not benefiting those who need help now. Viewed in combination, the performances of the critics expressed a wish of resistance against the concentrated forces of power, hoping “to really enliven Hurricane Katrina as a means for change. . .for after this, we want no more business as usual.” In this way, the critics rejected the idea that the crisis could be overcome through a return to the status quo of social relations in the city, whether represented by renewal or reunion.

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ANALYTIC

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CONSENSUS

I argue that the performed relations between crisis and ritual of the post-Katrina Mardi Gras depend on continual tension between the provisional establishment of agreement on the center ground of symbolic significances and the continual shifting and transforming of this center per the evolving settings where symbols are used. The specific dynamics of this constitutive tension of social action establishes what might be called the “signifying practice” of consensus.21 The analytic of consensus is a tool to identify how communities of performance materialized a totem through the intersection of past representations and future imaginings and how they established a provisional accord on the sense and meaning of this totem. The first dimension marks the subject of consensus: the dialectic of historical materiality at play in the performances’ construction of a specific kind of totem, a mythic personality, which harnesses shared history into a condensed rallying cry, a “wish” that orients action toward the crisis.22 This dialectical totem is implicated in the act of performance and emerges through the interrelated acts of restoring the past, as well as meaningfully completing this restoration by implicating it in the active imagination of a possible future. The second dimension articulates the practice of consensus: the active process of attaining a provisional state of accord on the affective and semantic messages of the symbols deployed and assembled in performance. The formation of embodied agreement on the sense and meaning, the significance, of the totem is attained through each community’s coordinated engagement with a symbolic dialogue, as well as their juxtaposition against other communities’ performances. Subject of Consensus: Dialectical Totems. Drawing together Benjamin’s notion of the “dialectical image”23 with the idea of the totemic mythic personality further clarifies how the mythic personalities, the hero, eulogist, trickster, and critic, embodied an orientation to the crisis that is retrospectively meaningful and prospectively useful for a community of performance as situated against other communities.24 Situated at a historical juncture, the dialectical image, Benjamin states, is neither that the past gives light to the present nor that the present gives light to the past; instead, the dialectical image is where the past meets the future in a present constellation.25 Because the performances enacted totems that uniquely represented a vision of the social wounds endured by New Orleanians and the efforts needed to address them, each totem materialized a representation that uniquely recovered the historical materiality of the crisis, surfacing certain artifacts of its impact and occluding others in order to mount a collective effort to address those wounds. Such recovery, however, necessitated the calling forth of past traditions, the “archaic images [urimages],” as Benjamin terms them, of cultural practice (e.g., Mardi Gras, second line) to either front, blend, or hide the ruins of crisis. This play of ritual and crisis ruins— the archived tropes of both events—realized in a tension between revelation and concealment within each totem indicates a particular relationship with the future: a wish. Hence, the wish of ruins materializes the dialectic of past representations and future imaginings that established a more confined set of symbols that together gave form to a totem on which minimal consensus could be attained.26 First, the hero emerged from the ruins not only of longstanding traditions of royal costumes, courtly rituals, and cultural themes performed during the parade but

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also of the longstanding economic superiority and political clout of the social bodies performing. Where the former instantiated the “civilized” boundaries of the elite class, the latter allowed this class to showcase its power during its most unabashed performance of the year: Mardi Gras. Noted in the misrecognition of the dire state of city services and the absence of social concerns in their moment of silence, the hero’s exaltation of tradition and ignorance of crisis oriented the performance to the archaic past before the fissures of Hurricane Katrina. Bringing forth, as one audience member stated, “our traditions, the traditions of the families in this city,” demonstrated the hero’s vision of the future as the perpetuation of the social order “we have built and will build again.” The wish to renew the city, proclaimed by the hero, represented a dream to overcome the crisis as though its impact was but a minor unsettlement. Those who have “proven their resilience before,” one masker noted, “will do so again.” The “who” was those who have contributed to the city as it was and not, as many of the audience offered, “the criminals” who are now “thank goodness, gone” or the “whiners” who “cannot take matters into their own hands.” Like the masks concealing the elite’s faces, the hero’s ignorance of the crisis concealed grave racialized, economic abuses while revealing an evaluation of them as attributable to personal (not public) responsibility. Opposed to the hero, the eulogist emphasized the devastation caused by the crisis. But, like the hero, the eulogist attained the credence to amend the social suffering, beyond physical damages, through the confluence of ruined traditions. Integrating practices of mourning and festivity, a funeral procession and celebratory parade, the eulogist used the archaic images of established cultural practices to facilitate the reunion desperately needed after the crisis left many “not here with us.” Evident in their choices of theme and the position and dedication of their moment of silence, as well as their insistence in performing with dethroned royalty and marching through the damaged areas, explicated the use of ritual to bring together the community of performance. This communal act of remembrance, articulated by an audience member as “our way of healing. . .[is] to move on with what we have left,” merged past imagery of togetherness with the imagery of dissolution wrought by the crisis (i.e., the unsettling of Zulu’s “family”) in order to envision progress through the crisis. The wish of reunion, though oriented to the future, emerged from a symbolic blend that used archaic images of communal traditions to address the newly emergent images of crisis that challenged the community. This blend positioned a familiar pathway for the community that could, as long as the audience followed the cue, “lead them back home.” The orchestrated marching of the T-shirt brigades did not explicitly use the discursive force of any established traditions. However, the act of resignifying accusations in an effort to alter the meaning and direction of blame is well established in black cultural practice as a means to resist otherwise damaging significations.27 Their embodied communication demonstrated how the “exchange of blame” arising from the crisis held the potential to negatively interpret the behaviors of black, poor victims who, in the wake of the storm, tried to cope with their destitute conditions. By appropriating the invidious accusations, the trickster’s resignification of the ruins of accusations—helplessness, on the one hand, and unwarranted violence, on the other—demonstrated an effort to publicly and presently vindicate the community

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while retroactively blaming those supposed to have applied them, the mass of beholders. Their performance did not demonstrate an orientation to a glorious past of resilience or unity, nor a hopeful orientation to the future, but rather an orientation to the city’s present racial tension. A resignification of behavior, their performance was perhaps an effort to “save face” for the accused and to deface the supposed accusers. Finally, the unofficial parades, as the only performances that explicitly stressed the political abuse and neglect of the crisis, deployed the literal ruins of the crisis through the mask of Mardi Gras traditions. Calling out through chants or signs the characteristic imagery, objects, and social institutions of Hurricane Katrina, the critics highlighted the structural poverty and organizational failures exposed by the crisis. They did so by using the customary practices of floats, costumes, and throws of Mardi Gras in order to enable, in contrast to Rex, an emphasis on the crisis’s impact and moreover, the social ills that caused it. The critic’s refusal to silence the social forces (as opposed to the hurricane’s natural force) at work in making the crisis oriented the community of performance to a future where the past, like its images, would be “turned upside down.” Built on the subversion of ruins, their wish came to the fore through the performance’s disavowal of the past and interest in change. To resist by questioning the past’s concentrated forces of power was, at base, an iconoclastic hope to alter them, for the critics insisted that social change is part and parcel to remaking a viable New Orleans. These four examples illustrate that these totemic mythic personalities materialized at the juncture of past and future as a representation of how the past can be rendered intelligible and how it can be made useful for the imminent future. Within each performance, the totem formed a different dialectical image through the use of a unique combination of ritual and crisis symbols, which communicated disparate orientations to not only the crisis, but the persistence of sociality in New Orleans. Performing consensus on the significance of these wishes of ruins—renewal, reunion, resignification, and resistance—within each community of performance, however, cannot be fully appreciated without attention to the coordinated and juxtaposed symbolic exchanges occurring within and between the communities. Practice of Consensus: Sense and Meaning. Articulating minimal consensus within the performances demands an illustration of how each community established copresence, engaged in a meaningful dialogue, and was differentiated from other coeval performances. Each of these conditions of emergence, however, cannot be apprehended sequentially; they are realized in their simultaneous and collaborative execution. The ensuing illustrations emphasize the layered communicative practices that associated emergent and traditional symbols with the consequence of forming relations and divisions among individuals. This emphasis will develop the concept of minimal consensus as an evolving practice, highlighting the extent to which this Mardi Gras actively performed the formation of common understandings of the relation between the ritual and the crisis and yet also reinforced contentious differences regarding these understandings. “The very act of congregating,” Durkheim states, “is a very powerful stimulant,” for within a state of closeness emotions begin to “echo” each other.28 This, he argues, leads inevitably to a “harmony and unison of movement,” a rhythm where those present together, “co-present,” become joined in the mutual expression of their affective

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excitement.29 The intensified experience of co-presence occurred on the level of the collective through the inhabitation of the city during the post-Katrina Mardi Gras. Many revelers attested to the sensible intensification rendered through the heightened activity of the city, asserting this is the “first time the city feels alive since Katrina.” Yet, beyond the citywide revelry, each of the communities of performance generated and occupied a unique space of co-presence. Whereas the Zulu and Rex parades initiated a coordinated rhythm between performers through the measured beats of parades and throws, the unofficial parades did so through the dual acts of embodying stagnant, enclosed spaces where throws were exchanged and marching between these spaces in coordinated waves of movement. The T-shirt brigades, however, generated co-presence through orchestrating a highly rhythmic and tightly woven march against the muddled, stationary bodies of the mainline parade audiences. In this very act of coming into a space of closeness, all of the performers entered into an experience unlike their everyday encounters. Here, they entered a space charged with, what Durkheim calls, the “energized impulses of others’ impressions”30 where an intensity of experience emerged; as one unofficial parade participant stated, “It’s so exciting here now. . .our rhythms, our bouncing off each other. . .the excitement is unstoppable.”31 Building on Durkheim, I seek to draw attention to the unique forms of affective intensity that the performances produced through embodying their disparate totems. Within the entire ritual of Mardi Gras, the rhythmic echoes of bodily, verbalized, and inscribed gestures of the performances not only demonstrated the constitution of different spaces of intensity, but these intensities held different significance for the communities. This is because performance, in its production of intense co-sympathizing, is more than an exchange of symbols that designates semantic referents.32 Because consensual practice highlights the affect of performance, its use, as an analytic, appreciates that an attainment of a momentary state of mutual accord on the meaning of symbols involves the practice of bringing individuals to a state where they share, and inextricably so, a sense of the symbols, a feeling that the symbols ignite. In so doing, consensual practice nuances how, and in what form, intensified co-presence fashions a unified social corpus, such as Durkheim’s “collective effervescence” (the compression and exaltation of one collective33) or Turner’s “communitas” (“the domain of equality where all are placed without distinction on an identical level of social evaluation”34). As palpable constructions that emerge from symbolic exchanges within a state of collective intensity, the totems evolve during situated and distinctive interaction. The significance of the mythic personality hence reflects the needs and desires of individuals to settle on interpretations of events in order to collectively act on (or with) them. But, because the settlement is negotiated through communication, it resists attaining a homogeneous or fixed state of significance across an interacting collective. Rather, communication only temporarily and restrictively warrants consensus within the specific setting of interaction. Articulating how the different performances attained this active accord involves describing, in the tradition of Bakhtin, the structure and specificity of their communication or, more precisely, their dialogic interaction within the community and against other communities. Dialogic interaction demonstrates how the significance of each community’s embodiment of a

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totemic mythic personality specifically evolves in an environment of performative unity and alterity.35 As the very preconditions of performance, these coordinated exchanges of significant gestures carve up the nebulous region of intensified co-presence by giving valence to particular performances within the collective. Dialogue, as the ever-present orientation to a “greater or lesser degree” of one’s utterance toward some “other’s utterances,” Bakhtin suggests is foundational to all communication.36 Appropriating the meaning in communication depends not only on the arrangement of a “neutral and impersonal language” but also on how the “gestural” symbols exist in dialogue within developing social situations. Situational use reflects a historical dialogue (engagement of past uses) and an interactional dialogue (engagement with others’ uses), the intersection of which outlines the tension between tradition and change. The symbolic gestures communicated within the Mardi Gras performances of 2006 carry the traces of the conceptual and social changes they have made through their yearly renditions. This was made plain in the performances’ uses of ritual symbols in relation to the emergent crisis symbols. Yet the meanings of symbols are also co-constructed by those with whom the community of performance is interacting within the present environment of the ritual. Bakhtin emphasizes that this co-construction locates a tension between the “coming together” of individuals on their similar uses of symbols and also the “coming apart” of individuals per their different uses of symbols.37 Communicating meaning within interaction entails not the merging of all into one but rather the founding of a unique space of accord that is simultaneously with some individuals and against others. Because the Katrina crisis impacted social relations within the city, creating fissures within social groups, the performances brought the community to a tenuous state of accord on the social implications of the event. The efforts to form a level of consensus were especially salient. Yet because the crisis also demonstrated strong divisions across social groups, it initiated the use of the ritual to front and comment on the rifts between groups. Such divisions were identified and created in the totemic features—from overcoming to mourning, joking to critiquing—and in the spaces of their deployment—from high to low, dry to wet ground. Merging dialogic accord and discord, minimal consensus settled through the construction of juxtaposed symbolic dialogues that took place on historical as well as two interactional planes, within the community of performance and against other communities, which furnished the evolving sense and meaning of each totem. Within Rex, the hero aligned the community of performance around a feeling of hopeful cheer, incorporating the audience into the timeless parade rendition. Their insistence on having the parade met the willful enthusiasm of the audience members begging for throws, who called out “Thank you for parading!” on numerous occasions when throws landed in their hands. During the scene of the parade, audience members attested to both the pride that they have in their city (as Rex displayed its thematic icons of culture) and the assurance that New Orleans will recover. One audience member stated, “This parade reminds us of the history of our city. . . .It is a history that what happened cannot destroy. . . . We know that now with Rex here today.” Moreover, the earnestness with which Rex orchestrated control of the city was echoed in the accounts of audience members who articulated how “this is not a party like what they show on TV. . .it is us bringing back our traditions.” These traditions

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included the exchanges of throws, cheers, and also the honorary gestures of salutes and bows, which marked the embodied recognition of the elite power of the Rex parade. As tied to the performed strength of the maskers, the performed loyalty of the Rex parade audience also undoubtedly rested on the creation of a space apart from the crisis. From the high, dry ground of city center, where the mark of Katrina is all but erased, the hero’s exhortation to overcome the crisis through renewal of the city resonated easily across the audience. Such ease was also supported through the location of the moment of silence. Indexing an acclaimed Civil War general, this locale called forth among the community their actual past heroes, who have long been mobilized to instantiate conceit among the elite, as well as to make claims regarding the ownership of urban space and control of urban affairs.38 The tenable status of this message, however, arose through the surfacing not only of the piles of waste and graffiti tags after the passage of the parade, but also in the references to the crisis played out in the three other performances. Incorporating them into a funeral procession, which necessitated insider knowledge of the symbolic meaning of gestures, the eulogist of the Zulu parade brought its community to a feeling that rested between mourning and rejoicing. Following the cued dialogue of the procession, most noted in the synchronized raising of coconuts and the incitement of song and dance, the audience substantiated and solidified the intended affect of the eulogist. Where one audience member highlighted the “calm made through our parade,” another noted how Zulu made “it now okay to celebrate.” Joining these feelings within the very spatial and movement choreography of the parade, Zulu coordinated the community to merge in the act, as much as the belief, of reunion. In so doing, the Zulu parade invaded the parade to follow. The Zulu maskers challenged the strength and dignity of the following Rex parade as its unwelcome reminder that the “hero’s civilized city” rests on the misrecognition of the economic and cultural contributions made by the black, working class, that needs to be reunified for renewal to even begin. Moreover, the transgression of Zulu into the ruined neighborhoods and their tribute to them reminded the community of Rex that reunification was indeed necessary, for much needed to be rebuilt. One audience member developed this point: “We parade second but have more fans. . .makes no sense. But it’s a good thing today ‘cause we can show Rex that all those away must come home before anything is rebuilt.” Yet, as the parades collided in Zulu’s departure and Rex’s beginning, Rex audience members replied to this assertion with the remarks that “we are not whiners like them” and “people should just start building their own communities.” These totems, the hero and the eulogist, at this moment engaged in a symbolic tour de force where their wishes—renewal and reunion—battled for sequential precedent. The T-shirt brigades, though mute, initiated a dialogue between the performers through their unified display of a single message on their bodies. The valence of their message, as a twisted assertion of blame, instilled itself against the shock of the beholders through their forceful, uniform movements through the crowds. Generating an obviously discernible rhythm, the tricksters’ march circumscribed the space of the performance and also shaped the flow of the performed actions, insisting on the meaning of their wordless melody. The rhythmic march mirrored the satirical aim of the T-shirt, forming a crass parody of the mainline parades, which

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coded the brigades’ intentions as derogatory. Moreover, the blank expressions across the tricksters’ faces demonstrated an absence of shame in embodying the accusation against those confronting their bodies. Emerging at the intersection of their embodied movements and message, the tricksters’ resignification of behavior depended on the ability to orient an affect within the community while producing an opposed affect among their beholders. The tricksters, weaving between the Rex and Zulu parades and their audiences, impacted the symbols of these parades. The tricksters disturbed the flow and mood of the audiences of these parades, causing many to loudly condemn their actions. Second, they demonstrated to Zulu that reunification necessitates a struggle between communities to signify their social positions as much as a struggle within the community on the level of mutual mourning. Third, they fronted that which the Rex parade physically blocked and performatively ignored: the graffiti, the evidence of the moral panic that Hurricane Katrina spawned within the city. Last, by challenging the very definition of the community of the eulogist and hero, both based on racial ancestry (e.g., Zulu warriors, colonial royalty), the tricksters suggested that the community of performance could form through a mutual (accusatory) reaction against ersatz others. Despite their division into two groups, the flatbed floats and the street performers, the unofficial parades formed a dialogue among themselves that oriented their engagement in mutual condemnation of the politics of the crisis. Their joint repetition of chants and pointed exchanges of throws, both of which excluded the participation of the beholders, fashioned the critics of each group as members of a collective project of protest. As such, their alliance was strengthened by the identification of a common enemy. One street performer confirmed this idea: “I came out today alone with my idea to say something to those watching, but. . .it is not just me here . . .now we are really making the partiers [of Rex] look.” Additionally, the unofficial parades highlighted their outsider status by confronting these beholders from the low, wet ground of the city where the storm’s destruction was most vivid. As opposed to Zulu, however, this act did not engender mourning but rather furthered the efforts of the critics to emplace evidence of their message by indexing and using the artifacts of the storm’s surrounding debris. As such, the choice of place substantiated the dialogue of the critic, bolstering their acts of resistance. Due to this oppositional stance, the critics, more than any other totem, purposively challenged the wishes of the other coeval performances. Emphasizing the parade of Rex, the critics’ message took shape by, as the posters asserted, drowning “Rex,” understood as the ideology, the naturalized exaltation of the cultural and political power, upon which the man who performs Rex stands. If Rex, however, can be taken to represent, as “King,” Mardi Gras, then the critics can be seen as challenging as well the parade of Zulu, who, despite efforts to amend the festival in address of the crisis, articulated only its effects, leaving unacknowledged the causal factors that put at risk Rex’s “family.” By deploying its symbolic material to execute critique, the critics shook the very frame of Mardi Gras. Their actions impacted the festival air of the ritual, damaging the quests to “forget and party” heard across the entire scene. But, without the passages of the audiences of the mainline parades through their performances, the critics would have called out to an absent space. It was clear

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that their chants climbed as the crowds en route thickened, for, as one street performer noted, “We are here to remind the ‘bead whores’ of what is really important for the people of this city.” When analyzed collectively, each of the communities of performance can be seen to have joined together in a moment of co-presence where they engaged in symbolic dialogues that served to unify performers and audience while distancing this unity from other coeval performances. The repertoire of practices that each of the performances choreographed, cued, and coordinated represented a symbolic dialogue that aligned action in relation to the significance of the totem and thus, in relation to the significance of the crisis, for then and for now. In this way, each performance constituted an act of persuasion toward an ideology—an orienting framework for action—of how to progress through the crisis socially. The hero demonstrated an ideology of personal resilience, affirming the powers of individuals to “overcome the crisis on their own” by exploiting their (assumed) independent economic capital to rebuild the city; the eulogist demonstrated an ideology of moral unity, affirming the power of their communal networks to heal the social wounds of the crisis; the trickster demonstrated an ideology of clandestine collective action, affirming the power of orchestrated satire to reclaim their social pride from damaging accusations while denigrating others; and the critic demonstrated an ideology of public protest, affirming the power of resistant action to mobilize the crisis, as well as its causes and implications, as a force for change. Therefore, the performances notably revealed allegiances and contentions with the dominant, contemporary economic-political model of neoliberalism, the ethos of valuing and validating economic relations as guides for all social relations that is represented by governmental structures and officials at federal, state, and local levels.39 Explicitly fronting their ability to escape the crisis without suffering grave damages to property or welfare, the hero of the Rex parade left unacknowledged the social networks that greatly advanced, if not facilitated, this ability. With their emphasis on rebuilding, they demonstrated an allegiance to renewal through economic power, namely, the business infrastructure of the city. Contrarily, the eulogist stressed, per tradition, the viability of social networks to mediate economic loss and emotional suffering. Although not necessarily contradicting the neoliberal ethic of nonstate support, this performative statement emphasized social networks, rather than personal funds, as the alternative support mechanism. Specifically, it highlighted the need for redistribution in sustaining the city. The tricksters reiterated this need, though they added a more clandestine valence. Not only did the tricksters insist on exonerating criminal acts of redistribution (e.g., looting), they also hinted at the reluctance of the mayor to recognize the larger problem of economic oppression that provoked the metaphor of a “chocolate city.” Most fervently, the critics challenged the ethics of maintaining a racially hegemonic class structure in the city. Through the juxtaposition of symbols in their performance, these revelers asserted a relation between the elite’s misrecognition of the crisis and the state and federal neglect during the crisis. They emphasized the allegedly corrupt partnerships between government officials (including Mayor Nagin, Governor Blanco, and President Bush) and the business elite that exacerbated the crisis and could furnish, as posters threatened, the “death of the city.”

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Though not discernibly revolutionary or anti-revolutionary, these ritual performances hence demonstrated “the politics in all ritual.”40 Specifically, they engaged the motors of ritual and crisis in the political act of crafting an ideology with which to evaluate current social relations and provoke their reproduction or change. The full execution of this performative communication involved constructing and adopting an embodied representation, the totem, able to signify the event of crisis in the service of imagining and thus engendering future social action. The totem’s adoption depended on the coordinated exchange of these symbols through semantic and pragmatic communication during the scene of the performance. These dialogic interactions within communities of performances critically enabled each community’s exclusion from other communities. Explicating the complexity of the signifying practice of consensus, these performances manifested not only the dialectical negotiation of past representations and future imaginings to craft a significant representation of the crisis, but also the dependency of this significance on historically situated yet presently interacted dialogues that disseminate the representation’s sense and meaning. The achievement of minimal consensus proved necessary for each community to render the intersection of crisis and ritual sensible and meaningful and to, as such, outline, ignite, and authorize social action accordingly.

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Because this Mardi Gras contained disparate reactions to the crisis, the ritual complicates the established tendency to understand crisis and ritual as inherently oppositional categories of social action.41 Crisis, as an event that intensely demonstrates the instability of social relations and ritual, as an event that constructs an intensified vision of social relations, simultaneously exposes the structures of these relations and engenders the active process of reorienting individuals. Therefore, though crisis and ritual collide in the nature of their impact on social life (the former as “undoing,” the latter as “redoing”), their impacts curiously ape each other in that they both motivate processes of making sense of sociality, the roles and relations, associations, and divisions of persons within the agora. Rather than expressing the use of ritual to redress the crisis, this intersection instead expresses the contentious, symbolic interplay of both events to provide a forum and motivation for asserting which “exposure” of social relations is valid and, moreover, socially useful as a representation of the past and a motivation for action. Hurricane Katrina and Mardi Gras collaborated in their mutual establishment of a pool of potent symbols that individuals could creatively relate and deploy in their efforts to publicly support or challenge the social aims of ritual and/or the social effects of crisis. The performances’ unique efforts uncovered the vast range of possibilities for the (mis)uses of ritual in order to form a degree of accord on the implications of the crisis and the (mis)uses of crisis to form a degree of accord on the social implications of ritual. The performances can thus be seen to have established minimal consensus not only on the significance of crisis (through using ritual to steer social action in its wake) but also on the significance of ritual (through indexing the experience of the crisis during ritual enactments). This latter act, as seen most prominently

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by the critics and tricksters, not only evaluated the ritual’s social consequences in their general form but also indicated an evaluation of the ritual’s specific role in promoting the crisis. The post-Katrina Mardi Gras thus made plain the role of ritual performance, at times clever and discreet and at others frank and forceful, to address experiential conflict in order to orient a future relieved of its “menacing stance,” as Turner states, “in the agora.”42 Yet, to the extent that this ritual also warranted the address of conflict, it reinvigorated it, for it facilitated a space for competing evaluations of crisis. These four performances opened a complex terrain of social interactions where communities, conjoined through performance, interpreted and influenced the social significance of the ritual and the crisis. This landscape of performance can be seen neither as ritual’s use to redress crisis nor as crisis’s use to change ritual. In conclusion, the intersection of ritual and crisis in the post-Katrina Mardi Gras vividly demonstrated the myriad ways that each event can be combined within historically specific contexts of interaction to tread an inextricable duality of tradition and change, between the reinforcement and condemnation of sociality within the agora.43

CODA As the last float of Rex passed, an assertion cut across the sirens and footsteps: “By holding Mardi Gras, we are showing the rest of the world that New Orleans is not dead.” Not long after, affirmative “seconds” followed, and soon all that could be heard was, “No, not dead; no, not dead; no, not dead. . .” repeating endlessly as the memorable stage of New Orleans’s post-Katrina Mardi Gras emptied. Each of the performances fervently instilled this echo of assertions in their efforts to awaken New Orleans. But if their performed addresses of the crisis foremost breathed life into the corpse of the city, the forms of life they revitalized were remarkably different. It is my hope that this essay has enriched our understanding of the dynamic and diverse intersection of ritual and crisis by increasing appreciation for the dual processes contained in performing—making by doing—consensual representations of the past in order to raise hope for a certain future. This duality is best represented through merging the process of constructing a totem that may momentarily stand within while standing for a community by, first, dialectically engaging symbolic ruins of ritual and crisis to orient a wish for the future, and, second, disseminating the sense and meaning of this totem through dialogic exchanges of these symbols. The symbolic assemblages of the hero, eulogist, trickster, and critic drew together the symbols of ritual and crisis to furnish a degree of consensus on how to (re-)invent social life in the traumatized yet emergent city, to, as this essay began, “plant the flag.” In the most profound sense, the agora born of the post-Katrina Mardi Gras was a performative contest staged and waged for the very life of New Orleans.

NOTES 1. During my observations, I recorded daily field notes, which included descriptions of the performances and quotations from festival performers and audience members. All

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8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

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of the quotations contained in this essay (unless otherwise marked) were gathered during informal conversations. I chose not to record names. The “T-shirt brigades” is a term I have coined. I have been unable to discern a regularity of word choice among the festival participants. E. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1995), 220–22, 229. Ibid., 217–24. Hayden White, The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1973), 8. J. Curtis Waldo, History of the Carnival in New Orleans, 1857–1882 (New Orleans: Ghaham & Son, 1882). G. Bataille, Consumption (New York: Zone Books, 1991). Bataille observed that in a capitalistic economy where products accumulate at a rate surpassing their ability for consumption, individuals take relief in expending the excess unproductively. The accumulated waste of the Rex parade demonstrated quite boldly Mardi Gras’s situatedness within an economy currently unable to support the elite’s expenditure during the ritual, which put at risk the power of ritual act to effect the satisfaction of the elite. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (London: Oxford University, 1976). The most widely cited rumor was delivered by Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who reported during national programming of the Oprah Winfrey Show, that he had been “in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people,” but nearly all nationally distributed newspapers published numerous unverified reports of seven-year-old children being raped, nightly murders in the Superdome, roving bands of armed gangs in the Convention Center, or “dozens” of people being shoveled into the freezers of public shelters. It is necessary to add that after two weeks of flooding, city and state officials documented none of the rumors. The use of blackface in the Zulu parade has a long history; its first use, as Roach (1996) notes, dates to the decade after Plessy v. Ferguson. H. L. Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literacy Criticism (New York: Oxford University, 1988), 6. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse Typology in Prose,” trans. L. Matejka and K. Pomorska, in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 186. Ibid, 87. L. White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California, 2000). M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Ibid., 109. Ibid., 11. Turner, Anthropology of Performance, 131. Ibid., 129–30. J. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University, 1996), 246. J. Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1895), 265. Following Comaroff, I seek to highlight social action as a communicative process denoting the “meaningful structure inherent in practice and the practical structure inherent in meaning.” For the semantic complexity of the term “consensus” I am indebted to the etymological tracing of Raymond Williams’ Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

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22. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 220–221. 23. I focus my analysis on the contributions of Walter Benjamin in the posthumously published Das Passagen-Werk (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1983), with notable support from the reading of this work by Susan Buck-Morss in Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 24. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life; W. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk. 25. Benjamin, Passagen, 579 (my translation). 26. Ibid., 124. 27. C. Mitchell-Kernan, “Signifying Loud-talking and Marking,” in Rappin’ and Stylin’ Out: Communication in Urban Black America (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1972). 28. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 217. 29. Ibid., 218. 30. Ibid., 217. 31. Ibid., 218–19. 32. D. Kapchan, “Performance,” The Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995): 479–508. 33. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 221. 34. Turner, Anthropology of Performance, 137. 35. M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and other Late Essays, trans. V. W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas, 1986). 36. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 92. 37. M. M. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” trans. M. Holquist and V. Liapunov, in Art and Answerability: Early Essays by M. M. Bakhtin (Austin: University of Texas, 1990), 33. 38. The debate in 1993 regarding Mardi Gras Krewe integration and the removal of the Liberty Place Monument (which has inscribed in its granite base that the End of Reconstruction “recognized White Supremacy and gave us back our state” and stands in a central New Orleans park) provides a parallel example. See Roach, Cities of the Dead. 39. D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (London: Oxford University, 2005). 40. It is important to note that this insistence on viewing ritual as political follows the assertion of Kelly and Kaplan that key to understanding ritual is to understand the ritual in all politics and the politics in all ritual. See, J. Kelly and M. Kaplan, “History, Structure, and Ritual,” Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 119–50. 41. Turner’s influential model of the three-wave process of social dramas, which begins with a social breach, climaxes with crisis, and meets its redress with ritual, marks the solidification of an idea that has had longstanding in ritual analysis. See, for example, J. L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, introduction to Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 42. Turner, Anthropology of Performance, 34. 43. For a critical review of the literature on the intersection of history and ritual, in crisis contexts and noncrisis contexts, see J. Kelly and M. Kaplan “History, Structure, and Ritual.”

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(RE)IMAGINING ETHNICITY IN THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS: KATRINA’S GEOGRAPHICAL ALLEGORY STEPHANIE HOUSTON GREY

When Hurricane Katrina swept across the Gulf Coast in August 2005, the diaspora that it produced hollowed the city of New Orleans. In a recent issue of the New York Times, satellite photos revealed that the devastation is no longer evidenced by postapocalyptic debris, but by the rows of now empty communities that have left much of the urban landscape bereft of vibrant human activity. As these ancient neighborhoods dig themselves out of the mud and silt, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of persons has created a new challenge for this iconographic city. This challenge stems from the endeavor to recapture an essence that many feared had been washed into the Gulf of Mexico. As the shrimp boats that now serve as debris gatherers extract Mardi Gras beads from the ocean, the cultural gulf that has been etched into the urban landscape raises questions about the future of this community in an age where the American city has itself become a mere echo of civic society and celebration. Reflecting upon the racial implications of this event, it is clear that the storm ignited a combustible mixture of social and economic issues surrounding race, class, and space. The following discussion explores the nexus between social geography and the political allegories used to define those that inhabit urban spaces. The city of New Orleans must now grapple with both its representation at a national level and the realities of alienation so vividly amplified by this catastrophe—a process that means examining the role that its own history has played in creating certain geographical containment fields that isolate those populations most deserving of assistance. One common thread that runs through the accounts of those citizens who survived the storm emerges as a pronounced sense of betrayal. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the diaspora and the federal government’s ambivalence have created a situation where citizens and their organs of public deliberation have been deeply fractured. Significant

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portions of the city’s infrastructure, including large sections of St. Bernard and Jefferson Parishes, continue to suffer from the aftereffects of water damage and population displacement. The key to the successful reconstruction of New Orleans, with its unique and diverse cultural identity, revolves around the coordinated efforts of city leaders, contractors, and a citizenry that has largely lost faith in these governmental bodies. Recognizing the depth of this cultural rupture, the City Council of New Orleans adopted Resolution R-05-525 on October 12, 2005, establishing the Hurricane Recovery Advisory Committee. The charge of this entity includes rebuilding trust with the citizenry and business leaders, developing communication infrastructure, and speaking for the population of the city in a clear voice that reflects their concerns and anxieties. For a city to provide a genuine public space, it must address the gap between public and private identities so that urban designs and culture reflect the consciousness of those who inhabit them. One of the primary obstacles to realizing this laudable goal is the way that allegories of stigma and ethnic containment— social barriers that are often animated by racial dimensions—continue to inhibit this endeavor. Renewing a vibrant urban space means examining the grounds upon which the city’s sense of authenticity has been established in the past and confronting the spatial ideologies that continue to inhibit the process of recovery. Fredric Jameson notes that national allegories find their most vivid embodiment in the urban spaces where social divisions evolve into crushing material realities. The narratives that facilitate the citizen’s identification with the polis, while critical to the process through which governing bodies reflect popular ethos, may be deflected by interests that diverge from those of the population. Rather than creating a public space where government and citizens participate in meaningful exchange, geographical allegories function to divide, isolate, and stigmatize. This chapter traces the way that these destructive allegories were mobilized against New Orleans’s citizens of color during the Katrina event. This three-part analysis begins with the rationality of containment that marks many urban environments and the way that this logic “colored” the national response to the catastrophe. Then attention shifts to the history of New Orleans and exposes the factors that contributed to this national response by tracing the racial legacy of geographical allegory within the city—particularly the way that decadence has been linked to ethnic ambiguity in the lower Mississippi region. The final section proposes a template for appropriating these metaphors that link ethnic diversity to the unique physical and social ecology of the region and using this revised ethical vocabulary to facilitate a new consciousness that opens avenues of dialogue between the city’s citizens and its representative bodies. At the core of this discussion is the assumption that urban environments are not simply determined by economic realities and do not merely reflect the natural teleology of population movement but are the products of communicative practices. Only by interrogating these models of population management can the city of New Orleans posit a new future where its metropolitan ethos facilitates social progress rather than retarding growth and development. THE BIOETHICS

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The federal response to Katrina demonstrated that the catastrophe was not to be addressed via outreach and rescue but through strategies of containment. With the

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exception of the United States Coast Guard, federal responders established a periphery around the city that blocked access to its main staging areas for at least five days. People sat in unbearable heat and on overpasses—scavenging for food and supplies while trying to keep sick relatives alive. This delay was the result not of a lack of access to the city itself but of an unwillingness to enter the urban zone for reasons that have never been fully explained. Some critics of the Bush administration suggest that this failure stemmed from the federal government’s apathy toward these citizens and the region as a whole—that their responsibility ended after they simply stood in front of cameras and said that they cared. These explanations are, however, incomplete. During this time period, certain media outlets began to flood the airwaves with gruesome stories of rioting, murder, and particularly graphic accounts of child rape that were later revealed to be either fabrications or exaggerations. In their work on collective responses to urban crises, Stuart Hall et al. coined the term “moral panic” to describe situations where racial otherness is projected as a source of violence—leading to media hyperbole that feeds fear and hysteria, provoking a police response that is out of proportion to the actual threat that may or may not be posed. The moral panic generated by Katrina kept both police and military from entering a city that was in desperate need of relief, leading instead to the containment strategy. This sense of cultural anxiety regarding particular urban environments is not a new phenomenon, but it is nurtured and informed by metropolitan rationalities that place the isolation and management of ethnicity above other priorities. During the later half of the twentieth century, the American city became a focal point for discussions of civic culture, control, and authenticity. In her book The Death and Life of the American Cities, Jane Jacobs suggested that the new design schemes being created by urban planning specialists produced a cityscape that inhibited genuine community by allowing inhabitants to circumvent their neighborhoods while moving through them. Rather than fostering interaction within these spaces, interaction that is critical to the life of any neighborhood, the modern city became a series of containment spaces. In his reflections on the city of Los Angeles, Mike Davis notes that ethnic isolation creates a series of social barriers that many cities reinforce through a unique confluence of strategies that include police enforcement of social and ethnic boundaries, control of press organs, and architectural innovations designed to isolate disenfranchised individuals from what little public life remains intact. He goes on to write that “the universal consequence of the crusade to secure the city is the destruction of any truly democratic space. The American city is being systematically turned inward. The public spaces of the new megastructures and supermalls have supplanted traditional streets and disciplined their spontaneity.” Recent studies demonstrate that while many urban neighborhoods are more ethnically integrated than in the past, class distinctions remain intact due to the flow of commerce and social activities to the suburban periphery. The manipulation of modern urban infrastructure is designed to isolate both ethnic and economic groups from one another by creating a protective membrane around the privileged to shield them from those deemed less desirable. Thus, the federal response was not simply an aberration of administrative policy, but a logical extension of existing urban rationality. What the media panic that followed in the wake of Katrina demonstrated is the extent to which these logics, while often obscured by tourist guides and cosmetic

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social policy, reside very close to the surface and can be activated very quickly with devastating consequences. Glenda Dickerstetsun states that the media “have given us an orgy of wall-to-wall coverage chronicling the catastrophe,” likening it to a “blockbuster film, which uses the misery of the developing world as an exotic backdrop for a story about the travails of white people.” Here the citizens left behind to face the storm became a savage testimony to the dangers associated with color and the challenge that it posed to the rationality of law and order. This lexicon of violence and containment emerged within a media context where radio hosts were referring to the remaining citizens as parasites fleeing a dying animal. Fox reporter Bill O’Reilly labeled these citizens as thugs and drug addicts who were only attempting to leave the city because they could no longer get their fix. While rumors of ethnic savagery turned out to be fabrications, the racial codes used to define the looters activated the allegories of geographical decadence and transformed these survivors into a threat. Thus the chaos that emerged in the wake of the storm was characterized as an issue that originated within the indigenous culture rather than from these extraordinary circumstances. There can be few more vivid portraits of the impact that mediated environments and communication technology have on the management of space and population movement than in the days immediately following the storm. This continues to be reflected in the Katrina Smithsonian exhibit where the slow federal response is attributed to this violence rather than problematic social policies. Thus the savagery produced by the storm was naturalized by the composition of the population itself rather than the lack of supplies and medical aid. Katrina reveals that the problem confronting New Orleans is not just an issue of rebuilding infrastructure, but it is one that is deeply rooted in issues of urban bioethics. In her now well-documented visit to the Astrodome, Barbara Bush explained to television cameras that “so many of the people here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” This response demonstrates the lacuna that now exists between spheres of governance and the populations with whom they have either lost touch or against which they constitute their own interests. Henry Giroux refers to this ideology as the “biopolitics of disposability,” an ethical stance that views individuals as either resources for advancing political interests or potential barriers to the social and economic development of empowered groups. He proceeds to draw an extended comparison between the visual images spawned by Katrina and the brutal murder of Emmit Till in 1955: Till’s body allowed the racism that destroyed it to be made visible, to speak to the systematic character of American racial injustice. The bodies of the Katrina victims could not speak with the same directness to the state of American racist violence but they reveal and shatter the conservative fiction of a color-blind society. The bodies of the Katrina victims lard bare the racial and class fault lines that mark an increasingly damaged and withering democracy and revealed the emergence of a new kind of politics, one in which entire populations are now considered disposable, and unnecessary burden on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves.

While Giroux’s comparison is designed to demonstrate the extent to which these national political boundaries have created undesirable bioethical ideologies, the

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metaphors of ethnicity, the South, and the river preexisted as extremely powerful components of a broader geographical allegory. The comparison of the drowning of New Orleans to the drowning of a victim of a brutal lynching reveals not a direct causal relationship but a topographical legacy that permeates both the local culture that has birthed the Crescent City and the stigma that it carries as the southernmost urban center on the lower Mississippi River.

GEOGRAPHICAL ALLEGORIES OF WASTE, POLLUTION, AND ETHNIC PERMEATION The geographical allegories that mark New Orleans and the surrounding region are defined by a metaphorical interconnection between ethnicity and pollution. In the wake of the disaster, Mayor Ray Nagin asserted that New Orleans would remain a “chocolate city”—a comment for which he was later subjected to criticism. But as Michael Dyson points out, this characterization is not inaccurate. In many ways, this ethnic metaphor resides at the heart of the geographical allegory that demarcates the alluvial plains of the lower Mississippi. Using this concept of allegory to foreground the containment strategies that define New Orleans, Mayor Nagin’s metaphor represents a deeper symbolic undercurrent than is immediately recognizable when one ponders a map of the United States. As the Mississippi traverses the cities that run from North to South—from Chicago to St. Louis to Memphis and finally New Orleans—one sees a gradual shift in the allegories used to define these urban environments that belies a certain hierarchy. Residing as it does at the mouth of the Mississippi River, the city of New Orleans has been historically characterized as a site of expulsion, waste, and excess. When the unusual ethnic composition of the city is read through these geographical allegories, the impact upon both national and local policy can be devastating to the citizens of this region. The ability to characterize American citizens as disposable resources stems directly from a topography of ethics and race that remains embedded within the American consciousness. Tara McPherson describes the visual representations of the South as displaying a lenticular logic—a “schema by which histories or images that are actually copresent get presented (structurally, ideologically) so that only one of the images can be seen at a time.” In these depictions, the poverty and industrial pollution are often negated in pristine images of plantation ideals, allowing the social and economic problems associated with the region to remain more or less invisible to the national consciousness. This is compounded by the fact that the alluvial plain of the Mississippi is a sphere of literal expulsion where waste and pollution are forced from the nation’s industrial core. For many historians and urban engineering scholars, this dumping associated with the chemical industry is justified by the ethnic composition of the area. Much as the nation expels its detritus and waste through the great river, New Orleans and its citizens are marked by their existence in this topographical boundary as extensions of this expulsion. Given the power of this allegory to isolate and stigmatize entire urban populations—when, for example, news commentators feed these stereotypes by asserting, without evidence, that an entire

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urban/ethnic population is fleeing a disaster due to its collective desire to acquire illegal drugs—the need to rearticulate this unique cityscape is a pressing one. One of the animating features of Southern Jim Crow policies was the assumption that African American populations were more prone than whites to vices such as cocaine addiction and therefore had to be contained via legislation. These images and commentary do not emerge from a political vacuum, but they remain dormant in the American consciousness until they can be activated in times of perceived threat or crisis. As one moves south, narratives of progress and commerce are increasingly supplanted by metaphors of pleasure, waste, pollution, and decadence. The city of New Orleans has, in fact, turned these narratives into a source of income through its wellknown tourist industry. While Ronald Pelias suggests that the Creole carnival has emerged as a site for lived critical practice where pleasure can become a source of empowerment, these exhibitions also mark these urban spaces as spheres of iniquity. Narratives of ethnic decadence would continue to mark the city’s identity despite the fact that the carnival culture had itself been orchestrated by white business owners since the mid nineteenth century, when organizations such as the Mistick Krewe of Comos used the demonic language of Milton to fashion this city as a respite from the oppressive moral standards of the white middle class of the period. It is not surprising that the Hurricane has been likened to a Greek tragedy, complete with hubris and unheeded sibylline prophecies. Here in this great “ship of fools,” the carnival continued until the eventual apocalypse that brings the participants before their eventual divine judgment. In her book Southern Babylon, Alecia Long notes that historically the sexuality associated with New Orleans was peculiar for the region because it manifested itself through the violation of ethnic boundaries. The response of city leaders at the turn of the twentieth century was not to regulate sexual behavior but to police racial integration. The creation of the Storyville district was an attempt not to eliminate sexual activity but to maintain the color line that separated various ethnic groups from one another. Thus the transgressions committed by the city—in the eyes of its critics in other parts of the nation—were not just those dealing with over-indulgence, but it failed to sufficiently police the ethnic boundaries that drive the ethnic rationality of other urban centers. This obsession with ethnic division can be seen in Shirley Thompson’s description of the case of Toucoutou, a woman of mixed ethnic background who sued one local citizen for referring to her as a “woman of color,” a charge that threatened her marriage to a prominent white citizen. Her failure to achieve this status stemmed from a continuing struggle where the realities of ethnic ambiguity were coming into conflict with social policies that promoted racial purity in the face of licentious sexual practices. This ethnic ideology continues to animate the national debate surrounding the city of New Orleans as it remains a space marketed as a release from repressive ethical systems—a release facilitated by primal, ethnic color. Thus it was not sexual behavior itself that brought the wrath of God down upon the citizens of this city, but it was the inappropriate mixing of ethnic categories and the creation of the racial ambiguity that has come to define its amorphous borders. Mayor Ray Nagin would lend support to this allegory of retribution by publicly agreeing with Pat Robertson that the storm had been a divine judgment directed against the city for its iniquity. At the February 2006 Martin Luther King Day ceremony, he stated

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that “surely he [God] is mad at black America also. We’re not taking care of ourselves, we’re not taking care of our women, and we’re not taking care of our children.” This unfortunate choice of words lent support to the allegorical ideology that posited the city as a space where moral transgressions were characterized as the logical extension of the city’s ethnic conglomeration. The geographical location of the city, combined with its unique culture, has led to a presumption that the entire region exists in a natural state of degradation. In her analysis of the literary styles that followed Reconstruction, Jennifer Greeson argues that Southern culture was exported through images of a people “glorified by disaster.” The presumption that the city and the region itself is doomed to suffer has, in many ways, permeated the local culture itself. Clyde Woods suggests that this has sparked a rebirth in the blues culture of the region, writing that this “indigenous knowledge system has been used repeatedly by multiple generations of working-class African Americans to organize communities of consciousness.” Yet in some ways this indigenous epistemology views social isolation and economic deprivation as inevitable and inescapable conditions. This inability to adopt a restorative narrative is the product of a geographical allegory that transposes the ethnic fragmentation experienced within other urban cultures onto the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, rendering their urban space a withering appendage. Thus, the existing media institutions and urban boundaries have reduced the disaster to a dramatic event that further isolates these communities.

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This regulation of racial ambiguity animates these narratives that dictated that the city deserved to be punished for its transgressions. In a discussion of the social metaphysics of racial mixing, Naomi Pabst suggests that those caught in the middle “are regulated, disciplined, and punished by being cast as inauthentic,” as “white” and/or “white-like.” The problem that New Orleans presents is not an immediate physical threat, but it is a threat to the ethnic logic of racial division and containment. Teresa Zackodnik goes on to suggest that “the disruption posed by the mulatto’s racial illegitimacy as neither white nor black, then, was neutralized to a certain extent by this concentration on issues of moral legitimacy.” Thus frameworks of morality, or the decadence of uncertainty, become linked to the threat that accepted borders and ethnic logics can be challenged and permeated. While the carnival is a site of release and sexual freedom, it also represents a site where the biopolitics of blood and alchemy threaten to destabilize existing racial hierarchies. Castigating New Orleans as a sphere of moral degradation stems directly from these attempts to maintain ethnic borders, thus isolating its urban populations of color. The challenge for the city is to create a shift in the ethical categories and frameworks that have been used to define these urban spaces. If the Hurricane Recovery Advisory Committee (HRAC) is to be successful in reestablishing trust within the community and creating a thriving urban economy, the geographical allegories of pollution and decadence that directly breed apathetic public policies must be recognized and addressed. In their call for a renewed attention to urban bioethics as a

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unique field of study, V. Ruth Cecire, Jeffrey Blustein, and Alan Fleischman write that “what marks and, for some, stigmatizes urban existence is the magnitude and extent of poverty; the multiplicity, urgency, and severity of related social problems; and the uneasy coexistence of citizens and immigrants across a wide economic spectrum. The latter generates. . .tensions that arise from the challenge of creating a unifying moral consensus that will nourish the public good.” This renewed attention to an ethical system that focuses upon the factors that can bridge communities remains one of the best possibilities for rebuilding the shattered ties between the citizens of the city and their local leaders. To directly address the allegorical degradation of their urban spaces, this commission should look for new, invigorating metaphors that draw upon the city’s unique qualities to create a binding force that will lead it into the future. In an analysis of the Corps of Engineers’ response to the disaster, Todd Shallat notes that “in the wake of Hurricane Katrina the agency confronts a conundrum beyond the scope of its dam-it, ditch-it tradition; how to let the world’s thirdranking river approximate the rhythms of nature, and meander and spread its replenishing mud blanket across the Delta without disrupting navigation or risking a serious flood.” While the natural topography of the area is often seen as an obstacle to development and economic prosperity, so are its urban populations. It is this assumption that the fluidity and ambiguity of the area constitutes a sign of its degradation that must be addressed and, if possible, revised. Most urban spaces are constructed through a rationality of division where groups or classes of individuals are managed and separated via a series of containment fields to ensure that individuals can persist in isolation. In his most recent work on the new templates for understanding urban landscapes, Edward Soja notes that the binary logic of class no longer works because we now must deal with polymorphous identities that ebb and flow through unexpected gaps in social boundaries. The creative reformulation of the vacuum left by Katrina presents an opportunity to create a city that, rather than isolating humans as disposable debris, can be imagined using a new set of principles. An authentic space is one in which citizens move freely through space and acquire access to public spheres of deliberation and commerce—but do so in a way that allows for the mutual recognition of the essential humanity of the entire polis. Forty-five years ago, Jacobs suggested that the rationality of efficiency had killed the city because people moved in isolation from one another and in ignorance of the neighborhoods where local consciousness is produced. The challenge for the city of New Orleans stems from its ability to take its ambiguous, amorphous topographical qualities and use these to create a counternarrative to the allegories of expulsion and decadence that have been deployed to render its diverse and vibrant urban population a product of waste. Historians of social engineering have long recognized that the city of New Orleans is peculiar, given that the integration of culture, history, geography, and nature combine to create a unique chemistry. The city itself is unstable and exists in a liminal zone that is constantly shifting and sinking as new land is added while other portions are eroded away. William Howarth suggests that swamps and wetlands have a peculiar ontology within western literature that impacts the manner in which they are represented within our culture. Often these places that are neither land nor water are viewed as “dangerous, useless, fearful, diseased, noxious.”

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Conversely, their topographical ambiguity can be reconstituted as a more positive discursive zone that is seen as places of “beauty, fertility, variety, utility, and fluidity.” It is precisely this fecundity that can animate New Orleans as a unique urban space where the boundaries of modern urban rationality can be challenged. Here, the rich indigenous culture becomes a sign not of licentious moral behavior but of creativity and invention. Jazz music, with its focus upon “condensation, fragmentation, and the innovative use of found-material, articulated always with an eye toward prior tradition,” creates a sphere where the very character of the city can emerge as a source of rich invention. While tourists are titillated by tales of corpses bubbling to the surface during rainstorms, the jazz funeral remains a unique tradition where the zone between life and death, much like that between water and land, is subject to scrutiny. The presence of the city is in its power not to reinforce the binary logics of division and containment but to embody a tradition that celebrates ambiguity as a moral strength rather than a source of weakness. The central dilemma facing the city of New Orleans centers around city planners’ ability to confront the urban vacuum that still exists at the heart of the city while creating an urban design that embodies its ethics of diversity. In his discussion of the allegories of colonialism that have come to define the city of Nairobi, Joseph Slaughter describes a city that provides the illusion of vibrant urban culture but is in many ways an absent city, where the forces of export lead to an economic emptiness at its core. In some ways, this phenomenon has become a hallmark of the American urban space as well: while providing for the transport of goods, it does not signal the presence of life. M. Christine Boyer suggests that this modern rationality creates urban environments that are unrecognizable and without historical location. Local communities were reorganized according to a logic of movement and commercial efficiency that erased their unique consciousness and produced the now-familiar modern “this place = any place” vertigo. As the public was further fragmented into a series of private interiors, the modern city evolved to accommodate this new ethic through the suburban trend labeled variously “spread cities” “edge cities” “disurbs” or “post-suburbs.” The city of New Orleans stands at a unique point in history where its unique cultural flavor can emerge to contest this seemingly inexorable march of progress. Rather than a choice between the present core or the absent citizen, it has the possibility to become a place where its infrastructure and governance can evolve to reflect the carnival as a rejuvenating force. To avoid the fate of those spaces that have surrendered to become a series of edges, it can become an organic system where its citizens participate in the rebuilding process and, through their dialogue, create an authentic urban experience. The challenge that the recovery organizations face is substantial because the politics of space continue to marginalize citizens of color from the political and economic centers of commerce within which these ethics of division are generated.

CONCLUSION For the public sphere to serve the needs of its populace, it must be ideally situated as a site for public engagement, deliberation, and trade; it must also be integrated

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with communication technology. For Richard Sennett, these issues of functionality are preceded by a concern over authenticity: a citizenry finding its sense of identity in increasingly privatized spaces leads to a balkanization of culture. This logic of urban containment has emerged in New Orleans from a series of problematic historical assumptions about the nature of the city and its unique consciousness. The geographical allegories of Southern degradation find their nexus in a city that has been denigrated as a zone of both environmental and moral pollution. Even many of its leaders have been implicated in this system of thought that has emerged over the course of the past two centuries. If the HRAC is to be successful, it must do more than simply hand out government contracts; it must develop cognizance of the specific geographical logics that led to the city’s isolation during Katrina and address them accordingly at the national level. It must then address the extent to which these allegories have permeated the local consciousness and created powerful rifts between the citizens of color and their government. This paper has suggested that the local ethnic culture, rather than being viewed as an obstacle to recovery, can become a source of pride and reinvigoration. This is not utopian idealism but represents strategic reassessment of the city and its resources. The key to this process is to open channels of communication between the various communities that have been affected by the storm and work actively to reorganize the ethical character of the city at this transitional time. The complexity of this process is not to be underestimated. The creation of a more authentic urban culture means that the citizens see themselves reflected in the mediated environments that constitute the city itself. One place to start is to use existing media technology both to project these voices within the urban environment and to articulate this reorganization at the national level. These voices of reconstruction do not emerge from the discourse of violence and victimhood, but they allow the unique and diverse identities that compose the city to project their own indigenous knowledge systems in such a way that they can have genuine influence upon the urban planning process. Rather than people being treated as debris or obstacles, they become partners and interlocutors in the rebuilding process. At present the dramatic impact of the storm has subsided within the national media, and the process of reconstruction is not itself immediately accessible to a news culture that craves spectacle and conflict. Rather than allowing these citizens to slip back into invisibility, this project suggests that communication scholars have valuable roles to play in identifying areas where social barriers can be permeated through existing technologies and new, more vigorous narratives that form the backbone of urban organization.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, Barbara. “Cradle of a Revolution? The Industrial Transformation of Louisiana’s Lower Mississippi.” Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 112–19. Boyer, M. Christine. Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Bullard, Robert. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990.

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Brattain, Michelle. The Politics of Whiteness: Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern South. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Cecire, V. Ruth, Jeffrey Blustein, and Alan Fleischman. “Urban Bioethics.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10 (2000): 1–20. Coclanis, Angelo, and Peter Coclanis. “Jazz Funeral: A Living Tradition.” Southern Culture 11 (2005): 86–92. Cohen, Michael. “Jim Crow’s Drug War: Race, Coca-Cola, and the Southern Origins of Drug Prohibition.” Southern Cultures 12 (2006): 55–79. Constant, Edward. “Certainties of Very Low Probability.” Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 249–52. Colten, Craig. “The Rusting of the Chemical Corridor.” Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 95–101. Cuff, Dana. “The Figure of the Neighbor: Los Angeles Past and Future.” American Quarterly 56 (2004): 559–582. Davis, Mike. “Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Public Space.” In Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, edited by Michael Sorkin, 154–80. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. Dickerstetsun, Glenda. “Katrina: Acting Black / Playing Blackness.” Theatre Journal 57 (2005): 614–616 Dumenco, Simon, and Ann Marie Kerwin. “Bush’s PR Problem? He believes it Equals Action.” Advertising Age 76 (2005): 50. Dyson, Michael Eric. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. New York: Perseus, 2006. Fischer, Claude, Gretchen Stockmeyer, Jon Stiles, and Michael Hout. “Distinguishing the Geographical Levels and Social Dimensions of U.S. Metropolitan Segregation, 1960–2000.” Demography 41 (2004): 37–59. Gilfoyle, Timothy. “White Cities, Linguistic Turns, and Disneylands: The New Paradigms of Urban History.” Reviews in American History 26 (1998): 175–204. Giroux, Henry. “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability.” College Literature 33 (2006): 171–196. Greeson, Jennifer. “Expropriating the Great South and Exporting Local Color: Global and Hemispheric Imaginaries of the First Reconstruction.” American Literary History 18 (2006): 496–520. Gumpert, Gary, and Susan Drucker. “Communication and Urban Life.” Intermedia 33 (2006): 18–23. Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978. Horne, Jed. Breach of Faith: The Near Death of a Great American City. New York: Random House, 2006. Howarth, William. “Imagined Territory: The Writing of Wetlands.” New Literary History 30 (1999): 509–539. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of the American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Kelman, Ari. A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Kodat, Catherine. “Conversing with Ourselves: Canon, Freedom, Jazz.” American Quarterly 55 (2003): 1–28. Kolb, Carolyn. “Crescent City, Post-Apocalypse.” Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 108–11.

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Lewis, Peirce. New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Long, Alecia. The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans 1865–1920. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. McPherson, Tara. Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Pelias, Ronald. “A Personal History of Lust on Bourbon Street,” Text and Performance Quarterly 26 ( 2006): 47–56. Rambuss, Richard. “Spenser and Milton at Mardi Gras: English Literature, American Cultural Capital, and the Reformation of the New Orleans Carnival.” Boundary 2 27 (2000): 45–72. Reuss, Martin. “Searching for Sophocles on Bourbon Street.” Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 349–56. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Random House, 1975. Shallat, Todd. “Holding Louisiana.” Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 102–07. Shayt, David. “Artifacts of Disaster: Creating the Smithsonian’s Katrina Collection.” Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 357–368. Slaughter, Joseph. “Master Plans: Designing (National) Allegories of Urban Space and Metropolitan Subjects for Postcolonial Kenya.” Research in African Studies 35 (2004): 30–51. Soja, Edward. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. 2000. Thevenot, Brian. “Myth-Making in New Orleans.” American Journalism Review 27 (2006): 16. Thompson, Shirley. “Ah Toucoutou, ye conin vous: History and Memory in Creole New Orleans.” American Quarterly 53 (2001): 232–66. Trout David, and Derrick Bell. After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina. New York: New Press, 2006. Woods, Clyde. “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans? Katrina, Trap Economics, and the Rebirth of the Blues.” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 1005–1018. Zackodnik, Teresa. “Fixing the Color Line: The Mullatto. Southern Courts, and Racial Identity.” American Quarterly 53 (2001): 420–51. Zizek, Slavoj. “The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape: Reality and Fantasy in New Orleans.” These Times, October 20, 2005. http://www.inthesetimes. com/site/main/article/2361.

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THE REBUILDING OF A TOURIST INDUSTRY: IMMIGRANT LABOR EXPLOITATION IN THE POST-KATRINA RECONSTRUCTION OF NEW ORLEANS LOREN REDWOOD

On August 29, 2005, the storm referred to as Hurricane Katrina, one of the most deadly and destructive in U.S. history, struck land, causing massive devastation in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Less than a month later, Hurricane Rita hit the same area, magnifying the damage to infrastructure, buildings, and services for basic survival. Now, more than a year after Katrina and Rita, the efforts at recovery continue. The massive needs for reconstruction and attempts at revitalization of economies in the region have served as catalysts to changes in the demographic landscape. Mainstream media coverage and academic attention to the injustices experienced by survivors of the hurricanes are continuing to expose tangible evidence of racial and class oppressions. There exists, however, an omission in the examination of the complexity of racial oppressions. I refer here to the large immigrant populations that now comprise the primary work force in reconstruction of the impacted region. This work force is made up of primarily Latina/o women and men who have been lured to the Deep South by unscrupulous labor recruiters to fill the demand for low-wage, exploitable labor. In the examination of racial oppression and class oppressions post-Katrina, the struggles and abuses of this highly marginalized population have most often received one of two responses: erasure or hostility.

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A recently released report detailing ongoing racial division in New Orleans asserts, “In the aftermath of Katrina, the authors of media and political discourse wrote scrip about race war and job theft. They cast the actors as Black victims and Brown invaders, and told stories that distracted the public’s focus from the institutional responsibility of government and private contractors to insure that all workers are treated with fairness. This ‘bait and switch’ has fueled the perception of racial conflict and competition. The conflict has been embraced by many, to the disadvantage of the excluded and exploited communities.” The presence of this work force of alternately invisible and vilified low-wage laborers, instrumental to the rebuilding of the region, is the product of the larger structures of capitalism and of U.S. governmental policy and intervention. Of key importance in the rebirth of the economy in Louisiana is the rebuilding of the tourism industry, the primary site being New Orleans. This chapter exposes the inextricable links between tourism and state-sanctioned exploitation of immigrant labor and expands upon current understandings of tourism as an enactment of neocolonial violence. An investigation of the most recent shifts in labor and immigration post–Hurricanes Katrina and Rita will follow, with particular attention given to labor exploitation in the rebuilding of a major U.S. tourist destination. Acts of resistance and protest by exploited immigrant workers are discussed. Also examined are the rising racial tensions between African American communities and Latino communities in the Deep South brought about by labor conditions, creating hostility between local poor and global poor. This examination concludes with a look at immigrant rights advocacy organizations in the Deep South, their growth, and the need for racial coalitions to address shared oppressions. On August 25, 2006, the USA Today article “French Quarter Set to Roll” notified the American tourist that New Orleans was back and ready to receive visitors. The opening paragraph of the article stated, “On the river side of Jackson Square in the heart of the French Quarter, a dozen carriage mules stand in a line in the late-afternoon swelter, looking thoroughly bored from mane to hoof. Not clipping, not clopping, barely munching. Just standing there. Still. Mulishly underemployed.” A few days later Mitch Landrieu, the Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana, expressed his appreciation of the article. Speaking of the need to rebuild New Orleans and the state of Louisiana following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Landrieu argued, “Tourism is critical to the rebirth of Louisiana and, as the state’s second largest industry, it employs more than 100,000 people. This is why everyone can feel good about having fun while making a difference for those who make the Big Easy swing.” However, little attention was given to a more important and ongoing story concerning eightytwo guest workers, women and men from South America and the Dominican Republic, who had joined a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center against Decatur Hotels LLC, the wealthiest luxury hotel owners in New Orleans and one of the largest hotel chains in Louisiana. The case, filed in the U.S. District Court for Louisiana, focused on the issue of labor exploitation of immigrant workers, which had become increasingly common in New Orleans and other parts of the Deep South in the rebuilding efforts that followed Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The suit alleged that Decatur Hotels LLC, violated the Fair Labor Standards Act when the company failed to reimburse workers for the exorbitant fees they paid to

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aggressive labor recruiters working as agents for the hotel chain. Guest workers, recruited to New Orleans by the hotel chain, were brought in to work in hotel support positions such as housekeepers, guest service attendants, and hotel maintenance workers. Federal regulations require employers to first attempt to recruit U.S. workers and to demonstrate proof of their efforts before requesting access to guest workers. The lawsuit highlighted the fact that U.S. workers were available and that the company’s goal in hiring foreigners was to drive down wages. The number of immigrant workers currently employed by Decatur is estimated by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be approximately three hundred. The laborers recruited by Decatur LLC under the H-2B guest worker program, paid labor recruiters between $3,500 and $5,000 to take them to New Orleans. After being lured to New Orleans, many of these guest workers faced enormous debt and were struggling to meet their most basic of needs while laboring in luxury hotels, including the renowned Astor Crowne Plaza. Workers reported that the recruiters promised full-time work and wages between $1000 and $1200 per month; however, most received low wages in the range of $6.02 and $7.79 per hour, were significantly underemployed, and had no overtime opportunities; additionally, workers had not yet been reimbursed for the huge expense associated with travel to the United States. For example, Luis Lopez, employed as a room service employee at the Astor Crowne Plaza, reported that he “spent most of the last two months without the work hours he was promised. . .[and that] his last paycheck was for just $18.” Lopez further claimed that his wife, in caring for their three children in the Dominican Republic, was “getting desperate as debt collectors swarm in and she can’t buy food.” Lopez, housed in a Decatur-owned hotel for guest workers where he shared a room with three other men, paid $50 per week to the hotel for housing, the same hotel chain to which they were contracted to work. These workers had few options. The nature of the federal guest worker agreements bound the workers to their employers and disallowed workers from leaving, even if the employer did not deliver on promises with regard to wages, work hours, or working conditions. Teresa Ortiz, a guest worker also employed by Decatur stated, “It’s modern-day slavery. What are my options? I go home to Bolivia, poorer than when I got here and deeper in debt. Or I break the law to find another job.” The filing of the lawsuit was marked with a protest by the guest worker hotel employees staged outside the United States Federal Court building in New Orleans. Protest signs clearly reflected the injustices experienced by the workers. Workers and their allies held signs bearing the words “Dignidad” and “Dignity” while other guest workers wore enlarged copies of H-2B visas on ropes around their necks. Some held up enlarged signs of their visas, symbolizing the legal process that irreversibly bound them to their employer. In an effort to expose the extreme economic injustice, one man carried an enlarged copy of a check issued by Decatur Hotels Corporation for $18.08. Many of the guest workers also wore handcuffs to symbolize their bondage. The study of tourism presents a significant site of inquiry into the ongoing understandings of empire. The growth of tourist industries globally, initiated by “First World North” countries (either by direct investment or as a result of structural adjustment programs) impacts countries of the “Third World South” on a massive scale. Sharon Bohn Gmelch argues that “tourism has enormous social implications

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globally. It represents the largest ever movement of people across national boarders, eclipsing migration and immigration, refugee flight, pilgrimage, business and educational travel.” The enormous growth of this industry makes tourism an increasingly important site for investigation. Gmelch notes that “the travel and tourism industry generates $4.5 trillion (U.S.) in economic activity and provides over 2 million jobs globally.” Gmelch further reports, “worldwide, tourism employs one in every twelve workers and accounts for 11 percent of global gross domestic product.” This becomes a relevant concern to scholars when issues of labor in the tourist industry intersect with issues of subject position and imperial power. In this framework, tourists can be viewed as neocolonial actors with the labor of production for tourist sites performed by neocolonial subjects. The study of tourism is inextricably linked to the study of transnational labor, immigration and migration, labor market theory, and racialization, and it therefore requires an analysis of Western Empire. The role of the United States through government funding and corporate investment includes both the internal colonization exemplified by tourist sites within the country, as well as international sites of occupation. Tourism is a continuing location of colonial enterprise and is an enactment of nation-state violence. E. San Juan Jr.’s articulation of the U.S. positioning in terms of postcolonialism and corporate and state violence provides a context for the consideration of tourism. Juan argues that postcolonialism, the ideology of globalized capitalism, “offers a metaphysics of legitimation for those groups who stand to benefit from the predatory economics of uneven development, namely, transnational corporations and their compradors, including their retinue of postcolonial rationalizers.” The nation-state manipulates the use of immigrant labor as an exploitable and disposable workforce, especially in the maintenance of the tourist industry, following an established historical pattern. The aftermath of the Katrina disaster has greatly influenced migration and demographic patterns in the Deep South, calling attention to the legal, civil, and human rights needs of a disenfranchised population consisting mostly of Latina/o immigrants. The federally funded rebuilding of this major tourist enterprise has strategically promoted the recruitment of a large superexploitable workforce comprised of both documented guest workers and undocumented immigrant laborers. This strategy included the Department of Homeland Security’s deferment of I-9 employer inspections, which required employers to verify the citizenship status of their employees, and the Bush Administration’s temporary suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, under which employers must pay prevailing wage rates on federally financed construction projects. Additionally, the failure of the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration to uphold and reinforce safety regulations further demonstrates the inextricable links of the nation-state in the creation of superexploitable labor in the service of capitalist enterprise. The rebuilding of tourist infrastructure has proved to be a financial windfall for a select number of primary contracting corporations, most with connections to the federal government, who received no-bid contracts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and now stand to collect enormous profits from the labor of immigrant workers. The opportunity for further exploitation is even more serious when coupled with the fact that the trail of contracting and subcontracting is quite difficult to trace. James Hale, a vice president of the Laborers

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International Union of North America states “contracts let to the subcontractors are just plain invisible” and concludes that this environment creates “an open invitation for exploitation, fraud and abuse.” In addition, agencies such as The Hispanic Connection Inc., based in Baton Rouge, report a dramatic growth in the demand for recruitment of Latina/o laborers as H-2B guest workers needed for clean-up, construction, and service work in the aftermath of the hurricane. Guest worker recruitment agencies like The Hispanic Connection are in the business of recruiting women and men immigrants as H-2B workers for labor as janitorial and service workers in casinos and hotels and for domestic workers in private homes. Immigrant labor scholar Kristen Hill Maher asserts that “such businesses function less as employer agencies than as labor brokers, treating migrant workers as commodities for sale.” Maher notes a frequency of fiduciary abuses present in the contracting relationship between the agency and the worker.4 Maria Edwards, director of the Hispanic Connection, notes that her agency has been flooded with requests for laborers since the two hurricanes hit but is currently unable to meet the demand. She also observes that those employers she was unable to assist have gone to extensive lengths to find workers on their own. Prospective immigrant workers are particular targets for labor abuses at times when attempting to participate in guest worker programs. In November of 2005, the publication La Jornada reported that businesspeople from the Gulf Coast, posing as representatives of three different companies, came to the Mexican city of Guanajuato to recruit laborers. These companies’ representatives allegedly obtained permission to conduct business in Mexico from the Secretary of the Government and told prospective workers that through their connections to the Secretary of Exterior Relations, they were able to secure worker visas for those willing to come to the United States. Reportedly, many paid between $500 to $800 to these imposters, a fee that was alleged to be payment for a work visa and transportation to New Orleans; the representatives reportedly offered payment of $12 an hour for electricians, construction and carpentry; the day the workers were scheduled to travel to the United States, the recruiters absconded with the money. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated event but a recurring pattern of U.S. corporations who employ labor brokers. What is significant about this particular incident is the apparent complicity of the Mexican government, an act that further demonstrates the unequal power relations between the United States and Mexico and the reliance of the United States on Mexico for a large exploitable pool of labor. A recently published study of Latina/o workers in New Orleans, conducted by U.C. Berkeley and Tulane University, details the conditions for both documented and undocumented laborers. Study findings indicate that “nearly half of the reconstruction workforce in New Orleans is Latino, of which 54 percent is undocumented.” The findings of the study show that both groups are exposed to wage abuses, hazardous working conditions, lack of health care, inadequate housing, and police and Immigration and Naturalization Service harassment. In all cases, undocumented workers fare significantly worse than documented laborers. Undocumented workers are paid significantly less and are frequently the victims of labor theft, not being paid at all for their work. Employers, who many times do not provide workers with information regarding their identity, disappear or shut down worksites without warning, leaving workers

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with no recourse. H2–B guest workers, however, are not immune to wage abuses. Some guest workers relate that after being recruited to the Deep South, they have not worked for months, but they cannot look for other employment due to government restrictions. Still others report being virtually held captive by employers who confiscated their visas upon arrival to the job site and withheld wages. These workers report paying recruiters thousands of dollars to immigrate that has not been reimbursed. The incidents of hazardous exposure to toxins are too numerous to assess. Thousand of workers report they live in the homes that they are dismantling and are exposed to mold, chemicals, sewage, and nonpotable water. In recent accounts by H2–B guest workers, laborers report being forced to live in the same hotels they are gutting. Others report being forced to live in squalid conditions with contaminated water sources and very little food. Undocumented workers also have little to no access to health care when sick or injured. Roberto Lovato has reported on numerous incidents of laborers working on military bases in Mississippi who “complained of suffering from diarrhea, sprained ankles, cuts and bruises, and other injuries” incurred on the worksite; they were given no medical attention “despite being close to medical facilities on the same bases they were cleaning and helping rebuild.” Additional investigations of worker abuses have uncovered incidents of immigrant laborers threatened with guns when they complain of not being paid. In one case, two workers report being forced to work at gunpoint by their employers, who were also New Orleans police officers, for no pay. United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions have soared in the last year with the deployment of more than “725 personnel to the Gulf, including approximately 400 special agents from the office of investigations, 200 officers from Federal Protective Services, and 100 offices from Detention and Removal Operations.” The urgent demand for labor in the Deep South as a result of hurricane damage and changes in labor restrictions that have allowed for a high level of exploitation is already causing friction between established disenfranchised groups and their new counterparts. While many residents are temporarily displaced and may never return, active recruitment with the promise of lucrative work opportunities in the region is luring nonresidents to the area from all parts of the United States, as well as Mexico and Central America. Frank Mercado, a construction worker from Puerto Rico currently employed in Mississippi, states, “We’re brown people. We’re just an apparatus.” As a heavily disenfranchised group, these workers will likely join African American and black populations as another underclass of the Deep South. The “rebirth” of a tourist mecca demands this pool of underclass laborers, to both rebuild infrastructure and provide service work labor. Raymond Mohl has documented the ways in which the processes of globalization have resulted in changes in the Southern economy. Mohl attributes the demand and growth of a transnational labor force in the South to “new economic investment poured into the region as American and foreign capital.” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva examines the changes in labor brought about by globalization and a “new world-systemic need for capital accumulations.” Bonilla-Silva asserts that demand to maximize profits drives wages down and “has led to the incorporation of ‘dark’ foreigners as ‘guest workers’ and even as permanent workers. . .who are progressively becoming an underclass.”

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The presence of racial and ethnic tensions, which continues to grow in the Deep South, are the result of much larger systems of capitalism and a worldwide process of globalized labor exploitation. Edna Bonacich’s theory of “ethnic antagonism” describes the consequences of globalized labor, which speaks to the split between working-class African Americans and the new workforce of immigrant laborers. The prevailing rhetoric that directs the focus on to issues of immigration only serves to obscure the true issue. This claim is further supported by Fred Krissman, who cites neoclassical economics as providing an “academic fig leaf, behind which those who decry immigration can hide their nativist sentiments even as they dictate ever more punitive actions against immigrants.” Saket Soni of the New Orleans Worker Justice Coalition addresses this conflict by referring to guest worker programs as “wedge policies that divide African Americans and immigrants.” Guest workers brought in to the area for exploitable labor in the service industry create a “misperception of competition that positions labor issues as a wedge issue between communities of color.” Soni notes that in the post-Katrina economic crisis faced by African American communities in New Orleans, unemployment is “7.2 percent. . .[and] survivors are locked out of the hotel industry even as they struggle to return home and regain their lives a year after Katrina.” In the examination of immigration policy and imported labor, the Bracero Program, active from 1948 to 1964, is important to the U.S. historical context of guest worker programs. As Mae Ngai points out, other cases of contract-labor were in operation during this time period; however, “the Bracero Program was by far the largest project, involving some 4.6 million workers.” Ngai employs the concept of “imported colonialism,” which the author explains has “produced new social relations based on the subordination of racialized foreign bodies who worked in the United States but who remained excluded from the polity by both law and by social custom.” The history of guest worker programs in the United States is one fraught with problems of abuse and exploitation. Cindy Hahamovitch exposes the role of the nation-state by framing guest worker programs as “state-brokered compromises designed to maintain high levels of migration while placating anti-immigrant movements.” She concludes, “In the process they have drawn nations together in a new sort of dependency, in which the world’s wealthy nations rely on foreigners to do their hardest and dirtiest work, and in which poorer nations depend on earnings abroad for their very survival.” Concern for U.S. immigration policy as it applies to guest worker programs is echoed by the executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Eliseo Medina. David Bacon notes that the SEIU is “one of the AFL-CIO’s key policy makers on immigration.” In response to the Bush Administration’s proposed legislation regarding guest worker programs, Medina notes the hypocrisy of telling immigrants “you have no right to earn citizenship but tell[ing] corporations you have the right to exploit workers, both American and immigrant. . . .This proposal allows hardworking tax-paying immigrants to become a legitimate part of our economy, but it keeps them from fully participating in our democracy, making immigrants a permanent sub-class of our society. Such sub-classes are consistently vulnerable to a variety of abuses.” The labor abuses primarily experienced by an immigrant labor force in the affected regions go largely unchecked. According to the Gulf Coast Commission on

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Reconstruction Equity, Mississippi and Louisiana, which fall into the category of “right to work” states, have no departments of labor at the state level, and there is “only one bilingual Department of Labor investigator to cover the states of Alabama and Mississippi.” Thus, there are only two formal recourses available to the individual in response to labor abuses: a civil suit filed with the state where the work is performed, or a claim filed with the Federal Department of Labor. Neither action is likely to be taken by an undocumented immigrant. In response to human rights abuses, the Deep South is currently experiencing a growth in immigrant rights advocacy by such organizations as The Southern Poverty Law Center, The Mississippi Immigrant Rights Association, and Oxfam American (Oxfam). Also responding to these abuses are faith-based organizations including the Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc., Catholic Charities, and the Hispanic Apostolate of New Orleans (Catholic Legal Immigration Network). These organizations are providing another avenue for exploited immigrant laborers to pursue human and civil rights protections. In conclusion, a visit to the French Quarter, including a stay at the Astor Crowne Plaza and a carriage ride from an “underemployed mule” obfuscates the reality of the superexploited laborers who are integral to the creation and continued operation of this major American tourist site. The study of tourism must acknowledge the relationship of transnational labor, immigration and migration, labor market theory, and racialization in its analysis of the Western Empire as colonial actor upon the global south. The multiple connections between tourism in the “First World North” and labor from “Third World South,” the role of globalization and global financial institutions, the active encouragement of the U.S. government, and immigration policy, as well as the effects of environmental devastation on the health and safety of laborers recruited from the “Third World South,” make this a relevant area of inquiry. Another things obfuscated by the media and current scholarship is the presence of this workforce, which is either made invisible or vilified. What requires illumination here is the commonality of racial oppressions experienced by all communities of color now present in New Orleans and the Deep South generally. The rhetoric that is currently successfully dividing these communities must be confronted and interrogated. In the protest held by guest workers on the steps of the federal court house in New Orleans, Tracie Washington, Director of the NAACP Gulf Coast Advocacy Center and co-counsel in the case against Decatur Hotels, helps highlight this need when she joins hands with Latino and Latina American immigrants and calls for solidarity between communities. Washington notes that the New Orleans guest worker program is a “continuation of the racial exploitation that began with slavery in this country that is corporate-driven.” Indeed, the rebuilding of New Orleans as a major U.S. tourist destination in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita requires a large pool of highly exploitable labor. In this context, building alliances across racial, ethnic, and class lines presents the opportunity for greater empowerment for all communities in the fight for dignity, human rights, and social and economic justice.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bacon, David. “The Political Economy of Immigration Reform: The Corporate Campaign for a U.S. Guest Worker Program.” Multinational Monitor 25, no. 11 (November 2004): 9–13. Barclay, Eliza. “As Locals Struggle, Migrants Find Work in New Orleans.” The San Francisco Chronicle, October 12, 2005. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/ 2005/10/12/MNG53F74SK1.DTL. Bonacich, Edna. “A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism: The Split Labor Market.” American Sociological Review 37, no. 5 (1972): 547–59. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. “From Bi-racial to Tri-racial: Towards a New System of Racial Stratification in the USA.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27, no. 6 (November 2004): 931–50. Brown-Danis, Judith, et al. “And Injustice for All: Workers’ Lives in the Reconstruction of New Orleans.” Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, July 6, 2006. http://newreconstruction .civilrights.org/details.cfm?id=46602. Cass, Julia. “Guest Workers Sue New Orleans Hotel Chain: Immigrants Say Decatur Group Failed to Deliver on Promised Employment.” The Washington Post, August 16, 2006. “Center Exposes Exploitation of Immigrant Workers.” Southern Poverty Law Center, August 16. 2006. http://splcenter.org/legal/news/article.jsp?aid =205&site_area=1. Chandler, Bill, and Tina Susman. Interview with Amy Goodman. “Workers in New Orleans Denied Pay, Proper Housing and Threatened with Deportation.” Democracy Now! Online, December 16, 2005. http://www.democracynow.org. Diego-Rodríguez, Martín. “Timan en Guanajuato a más dos 2 mil posibles migrantes.” La Jornada, November 10, 2005. http://www.jornada.unam.mx/imprimir.php?fecha=200 51110¬a= 022n2pol.php&seccion. Fletcher, Laurel E., Phuong Pham., Eric Stover, Patrick Vinck. Rebuilding After Katrina: A Population-Based Study of Labor and Human Rights in New Orleans. New Orleans: Payson Center for International Development and Technology Transfer, 2006. Gmelch, Sharon Bohn. “Why Tourism Matters.” Tourists and Tourism: A Reader, ed. Sharon Bohn Gmelch. Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2004. Goodman, Julie. “Problems Growing Along Coast: Labor Department Looking into Disputes over Wages, Unsafe Work Conditions.” Clarion Ledger Online, November 6, 2005. http://clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051106/NEWS0110/511060 344/1260. “Guest Workers Charge Racial Exploitation, File Federal Suit Against Luxury Hotel Chain.” New Orleans Independent News Center, August 17, 2006. http://neworleans.indymedia .org/news/2006/08/8452.php. Gulf Coast Commission on Reconstruction Equity. Good Work and Fair Contracts: Making Gulf Coast Reconstruction Work for Local Residents and Businesses. Chicago: Interfaith Workers Justice, 2006. Hahamovitch, Cindy. “Creating Perfect Immigrants: Guestworkers of the World in Historical Perspective.” Labor History 44, no. 1 (2003): 69–94. Krissman, Fred. “Sin Coyote Ni Patr”n: Why the “Migrant Network” Fails to Explain International Migration.” The International Migration Review 39, no. 1 (2005): 4–45. Landrieu, Mitch. Commentary. USA Today. August 31, 2006, p. A10. Lavato, Roberto. “Gulf Coast Slaves.” Salon Online November 15, 2005. http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/11/15/halliburton_katrina/index.html.

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Lydersen, Kari. “Immigrants Rebuilding Gulf Coast Suffer ‘Third-World’ Conditions.” The New Standard Online, November 3, 2005. http://newstandardnews.net/content/index .cfm/items/2559. Maher, Kristen Hill. “Good Women ‘Ready to Go’: Labor Brokers and the Transnational Maid Trade.” Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americans 1, no. 1 (2004): 55–76. Mohl, Raymond A. “Globalization, Latinization, and the Nuevo New South.” Journal of American Ethnic History (Summer 2003). Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Oxfam America. “Disaster and Recovery Along the U.S. Gulf Coast: Oxfam America’s Response to the Hurricanes.” Oxfam America Online, February 2006. http://oxfam america.org/ (accessed March 16, 2006). “Post-Katrina Tourism in Louisiana Packs Fun, State’s Rebirth.” USA Today Online, August 30, 2006. http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destination/2006–08–24–new-orleanstourism _x.htm?csp. Roberts, Michelle. “Immigrants Sue New Orleans Hotelier.” USA Today, August 18, 2006, p. B3. Root, Jay, and Aaron C. Davis. “Undocumented Immigrants Flock to Jobs on Gulf Coast.” Knight Ridder Washington Bureau Online October 12, 2005. http://realcities.com/ mld/krwashington/news/world/12885261.htm. San Juan, E. Jr. Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Shriver, Jerry. “French Quarter Set to Roll.” USA Today Online, August 25, 2006. http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destination/2006–08–24–new-orleanstourism_x.htm?csp. Texeira, Erin. “Immigration is Dividing Blacks, Latinos.” St. Louis Dispatch, April 9, 2006, p. B6. “Update: Immigrant Rights Post-Katrina.” Catholic Legal Immigration Network, August 23, 2006. http://www.cliniclegal.org (accessed August 27, 2006).

P a r t

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C h a p t e r

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“DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS . . . ?”: MAPPING EMOTION IN THE AFTERMATH OF KATRINA MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans And miss it each night and day? —Louis Armstrong

George Bush doesn’t care about black people. —Kanye West

On the first anniversary of the Katrina disaster, a documentary film about the events premiered on HBO. “When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” was produced by award-winning, African American filmmaker Spike Lee. Lee used the enduring images of human suffering in New Orleans and the compelling narratives of hurricane victims to give new meaning and poignancy to the tragedy. Although the film is political in its thesis and conclusions, it is fundamentally an emotional tale about the heart of the experience of Katrina for the people of New Orleans. HBO promoted the film as an “intimate, heart-rending portrait of New Orleans in the wake of the destruction that tells the heartbreaking personal stories of those who endured this harrowing ordeal and survived to tell the tale of misery, despair and triumph.” In his discussion of the film and its importance, Lee makes a claim to the centrality of the emotional effects of the storm on its victims: “PostKatrina, the obituary column in the Times-Picayune is 30 percent more. Suicides are

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up. . . .People are just buggin’. And there are no facilities to deal with the mentalhealth issue down there. This stuff is going to have reverberations for many years to come. When you have children who’ve seen their parents drown in front of them or parents who have seen their children drown in front of them, I mean, how do you deal with that?” Building on this compelling articulation of the emotional effects of the storm, this chapter explores the interconnection of race, politics, and emotion in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. When the levees of New Orleans failed, it was not a colorblind disaster. The storm caused greater loss and displacement for black New Orleans residents (Cutter 2005; Gabe et al. 2005; Sherman and Shapiro 2005). The storm also provoked significantly different reactions from black and white Americans who viewed the unfolding disaster through the media (Bobo 2006; Sweeney 2006; Huddy and Feldman 2006). Not only did Americans of different races perceive vastly different realities about the events in New Orleans, but black and white Americans felt differently about what happened. The affective responses of African Americans were more pronounced than those of their white counterparts. These emotions are rooted in America’s racial history and the resonance of that history in contemporary U.S. society. In the aftermath of Katrina, emotional devastation is a political response. Using data from several national surveys conducted in the weeks following September 11, 2001, and the weeks following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, I map the differences in emotional responses among black and white Americans to both disasters. I then analyze this survey data to suggest that Americans’ political and racial beliefs were significantly related to their psychological experiences in the weeks following Katrina. Finally, I argue that the emotional map of Katrina responses demonstrates the centrality of race over class in shaping how black Americans understood and experienced the disaster.

EVALUATING AMERICAN FEELINGS

ABOUT

DISASTER

Katrina wrought enormous devastation on those who lost property, sustained injury and suffered displacement as a direct result of the flooding in New Orleans. While compelling and important, it is hardly surprising that victims of a catastrophic natural disaster experienced profound emotional reactions. Symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are common among disaster survivors (Harvey and Bryant 1998; Kessler et al. 1995; North et al. 1999; Davidson et al. 1991; Green 1991). Far more remarkable are the occasions when those who are not directly victimized by a disaster experience negative emotional consequences simply as a result of their vicarious exposure to the vulnerability and suffering of others. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, generated precisely this sort of collateral emotional damage for Americans who were not directly victimized by the events (Schuster et al. 2001). Several national studies demonstrate that in the days and weeks following September 11, Americans experienced elevated stress and signs of probable posttraumatic stress disorder (Shuster et al. 2001; Schlenger et al. 2002). In the two months following the attack, 17 percent of respondents in a national sample reported posttraumatic stress symptoms. Although New York City was most directly affected by

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the attacks, Americans throughout the country shared in the anxiety and stress that the tragedy evoked. While there was a shared sense of distress, residents of New York experienced more negative emotions; follow-up studies revealed that New Yorkers were still experiencing emotional suffering while much of the country had begun to return to more normal psychological functioning six months following the attacks (Silver et al. 2002). Proximity to the disaster left New Yorkers more shaken at the outset and more distressed in the long term than initially empathetic fellow citizens who could more easily return to normal emotional states. The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the National Tragedy Study between September 13 and September 27, 2001. NORC interviewed 2,126 Americans, with an oversample of residents in New York City and Washington, DC.1 The National Tragedy Study replicated a series of questions used to gauge the emotional state of Americans in the days following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The Kennedy Assassination Survey Symptom Checklist (KASSC) measures fifteen physical and emotional reactions to traumatic shock.2 Table 11.1 reports the average score on the KASSC for black and white respondents in both the national and New York samples. New York residents (both black and white) have elevated KASSC scores compared with their counterparts in the general population. New Yorkers were more upset by the events of September 11, but many people throughout the country shared a sense of vulnerability and sadness after vicariously experiencing the attacks on Manhattan.

Table 11.1 Mean scores on Kennedy Assassination Survey Symptom Checklist Mean National White n=641 Black n=95

SE

4.29

0.16

3.85

0.41

New York White n=166 Black n=81

Mean

SE

5.67

0.30

4.59

0.44

Source: The National Tragedy Study 2001 Table adapted from Tom Smith, Kenneth Rasinski, and Marianna Toce, “America Rebounds: A National Study of Public Response to the September 11 Terrorist Attacks,” Report of the National Opinion Research Center (Chicago: University of Chicago, October 25, 2001).

Importantly, when the KASSC score is modeled as a function of race, gender, age, education, income and employment and estimated with an ordinary least squares regression, the results demonstrate that in the days immediately following September 11, there was no statistically significant difference in KASSC scores among blacks and whites in either the national or the New York samples (Rasinski et al. 2002). In the case of September 11, proximity to the disaster was much more important than race in predicting initial emotional responses. Understandably, New Yorkers felt the tragedy most sharply, but all of America, black and white, mourned along with the city. NORC researchers concluded, “Nationally, the attack

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engendered anger, confusion and both defensive and altruistic behaviors. There is no indication that African Americans and Caucasians differed in their initial appraisal and behavioral coping. The overwhelming nature of the attacks appears to have cut across ethnic groups in response” (Smith et al. 2001, 6). While September 11 provoked similar initial responses from blacks and whites, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina revealed a wide emotional chasm between the races. A Pew Foundation survey3 conducted immediately following Katrina asked respondents, “Have you yourself felt angry because of what’s happened in areas affected by the hurricane?” Although a significant proportion of whites responded to the disaster with anger (46 percent), anger was much more prevalent among African Americans. Of black respondents, 70 percent reported that the events surrounding Katrina made them angry. Similarly, African American respondents to the Pew survey were much more likely (71 percent) than white respondents (55 percent) to report they “felt depressed because of what’s happened in areas affected by the hurricane.” These results suggest that Spike Lee’s documentary film accurately captured a sense that black America experienced the aftermath of Katrina with intense emotion. The Racial Attitudes and Katrina Disaster Study by the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture4 further explores the emotions that Americans experienced in response to Katrina. The Katrina Disaster Study, conducted approximately one month after the initial levee breaches in New Orleans, asked respondents, “In the past five weeks since the Hurricane Katrina disaster how often have you felt: so sad that nothing could cheer you up; nervous; restless or fidgety; hopeless; that everything was an effort; worthless; that difficulties were piling up so high you could not overcome them; and that you are unable to control the important things in your life.” For each emotion, respondents could report that they felt this way very often, fairly often, not too often, hardly ever, or never. Figure 11.1 reports the percentage of blacks and whites who felt these emotions “very often” in the weeks after the hurricane. There are clear and consistent differences between African American and white respondents. Approximately double the proportion of African Americans report the highest level of suffering from each of the negative emotions they were asked about in the survey. They are twice as likely to report being sad, nervous, restless, and hopeless. They are also twice as likely to feel overwhelmed, worthless, and as though everything takes more effort. Just over a month after Katrina, more than one in ten African Americans report feeling very often that they are unable to control the important things in their lives. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina provoked different patterns of emotional responses than the tragedy of September 11, 2001. There was little difference in how black and white Americans felt about the horror of the terrorist attacks. Predictably, New Yorkers felt worse in the days, weeks, and months following September 11, but these differences were true for New Yorkers of both races. The country mourned together in a sense of shared vulnerability. Although the aftermath of Katrina provoked strong emotional responses from all Americans, the impact of the storm seems to have been more deeply felt among African Americans. Black respondents were also more debilitated by their negative emotions. When asked if these emotions had interfered with life activities, 67 percent of whites reported that they had felt no

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Figure 11.1 Percent who report feeling negative emotions “very often” in the weeks immediately following Hurricane Katrina Source: Racial Attitudes and Katrina Disaster Study by the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture

impairment of life activities. Only 58 percent of blacks believed they suffered no impairment. A full 42 percent of the black Americans reported that their negative emotions had interfered with their life activities. Similar to the ways citizens of New York felt more distress following September 11, black Americans had more negative emotions after Katrina. While the response of New York residents is likely explained by their greater proximity to Ground Zero and perception of greater vulnerability to repeat attacks, these explanations cannot account for the heightened emotional distress of African Americans in the weeks following Katrina. Most African Americans have little reason to fear being struck by a hurricane with the potential to destroy their homes, neighborhoods and city. So why were black people more distressed than whites? It could be that black people are generally more sad and anxious. There is some evidence from prior research suggesting that African Americans report chronically elevated levels of emotional distress compared to whites (Amato 1991; Breslau et al. 1998). This evidence, however, is decidedly mixed. In some studies black Americans report fewer symptoms of sadness. In other studies, the racial disparity in negative emotions can be explained by controlling for class. Because of conflicting findings across multiple studies, the evidence is neither clear nor compelling that black people express chronically higher levels of negative emotions. Analysis of data from the University of Chicago Katrina Disaster Study shows that when income, education, gender, and age are accounted for in a simple regression model, race still has a strong and significant correlation with reported mental distress. This suggests that the emotional disparity

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between blacks and whites following Katrina cannot be accounted for solely on the basis of enduring markers of social differences between the races. Even if black respondents are not chronically more negative in their emotional reports, it is possible that the post-Katrina racial disparity is the result of African Americans regularly responding to national crises with more negative emotions than their white counterparts. Data on racial responses to September 11 show that this explanation is incorrect. In Table 11.1 there are no statistically significant differences between black and white respondents in the days immediately following 9/11. To the extent that there are differences in average emotional responses between blacks and whites immediately following September 11, those differences indicate that whites, not blacks were more distressed. The Katrina gap is not present in the case of national tragedy four years earlier, so it cannot be explained away as the mere extension of an ingrained racial pattern of response to disaster. The analysis below explores a third hypothesis, suggesting that the reason for the racial disparity in emotional response to Katrina lies not with the essential psychology of black or white Americans but rather with historical and contemporary racial beliefs that shape the political and emotional lives of many black Americans, but of far fewer white Americans. September 11 was widely understood as an American tragedy that was national in scope, but Hurricane Katrina was perceived as a more narrow racialized disaster. It is therefore the politics of race that helps explain why whites and blacks feel so differently about these two events.

THE POLITICS

OF

RACIAL EMOTION

Their government had forsaken them; they weren’t citizens but castoffs, evacuees turned effortlessly, in language and life, into refugees. —Michael Eric Dyson

When newly emancipated black men entered the American polity at the end of the Civil War, it was with optimism about the possibility of becoming full partners in the American democratic experiment. Despite having suffered generations of forced labor, formerly enslaved persons allowed themselves to embrace the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Having fought to preserve the Union, black men took on the franchise and ran for elected office. Black women and men opened businesses, founded schools, and formed organizations and associations to support their new status as wage earners, taxpayers, and citizens. Then in 1877 the Hayes-Tilden Compromise crushed the emerging dream of black citizenship. The country’s political parties balanced their own power on the backs of black people, negotiating away the responsibility of the United States to protect its citizens. The federal government withdrew troops from the former Confederacy and initiated one hundred years of creative brutality as the South instituted Jim Crow, lynch mob rule, and disenfranchisement. Still, with each major military conflict of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, black men marched into battle believing that their service as citizens might translate into protection by the American state. Black people earned a fraction of all other

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workers, but they faithfully paid taxes despite having been shut out of the public schools and accommodations that these taxes financed. As taxpayers and soldiers, black men and women expected the full rights and protections of other Americans, but the country remained steadfast in its refusal to grant them even the basic rights of access to public education, public facilities, government aid, voting rights, or social equality. Racial inequality has persisted into the twenty-first century. African Americans continue to earn a fraction of their white counterparts, suffer from worse physical health, enjoy fewer educational opportunities, are less well represented in politics and popular culture, and labor under persistent racial stereotypes. Despite significant and continuing racial inequality, one might argue that the last half-century has been the most hopeful time for black citizenship in American history. Having fought and died in the streets of the urban South, African Americans rolled back voting restrictions, asserted the right to fair and equal treatment under the law, and made real gains in education, access, and visibility. The months immediately preceding the Katrina disaster in 2005 witnessed several important milestones in the history of African American citizenship. The United States Senate issued an official and public apology for never passing anti-lynching legislation. The government exhumed the body of Emmett Till to bring closure to the murder that helped launch the civil rights movement. Prosecutors in the state of Mississippi reopened and successfully litigated the case of the murders of the three civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. These were positive steps in the history of black America, but when the levees broke in New Orleans, the destruction of the city was accompanied by a disillusion of emerging optimism about the contemporary state of black citizenship. It is possible that this history of disappointed expectations influenced the emotional reactions of black people during Katrina. I initially began to hypothesize this connection when I traveled to New Orleans in November 2005, just seven weeks after the levee breach. While in New Orleans, I conducted dozens of interviews with survivors of the storm. I also attended several community meetings led by Mayor Ray Nagin and his Bring Back New Orleans Commission. The emotional devastation of those who had lived through the storm was palpable. Everyone I spoke with had been displaced following the city’s mandatory evacuation; the majority had sustained unimaginable loss of personal property; many had survived the nightmarish conditions of the Superdome or Convention Center; some were still searching for missing family members and friends; and a few had confirmed that family members had died during the storm. As direct survivors of the storm, they manifested classic symptoms of posttraumatic shock disorder.5 I was not surprised to find that these survivors were enduring painful and raw emotions, but I was stunned by the nearly universal agreement among African American survivors that their suffering was related to their status as second-class citizens. An example of how Katrina’s black survivors in New Orleans talked about their own experience emerged in the November 14, 2005, meeting of Mayor Nagin’s Bring Back New Orleans Commission. The meeting was held in a large ballroom at the Sheraton hotel in downtown New Orleans, which had become a kind of headquarters for municipal action. Mayor Nagin presided over the meeting, and the official panel included representatives from several federal agencies, local utility

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companies, elected officials, and community leaders. After an update on the state of the city and the pace of recovery, members of the audience were allowed to come to a central microphone and address the panel. The first four persons who spoke were white residents from the Garden District area who had a variety of concerns about power outages, mold, and general health concerns. The fifth person to speak was an African American man who owned his own trucking business. As a local contractor, he expressed outrage at the “storm followers” who were making “$18 per hour while I can only manage to get $15 per hour.” In an impassioned plea to the mayor he shouted, “Listen. I got four hundred black men ready to work, and we are being talked to like dogs. This is our city and we are being treated like second-class citizens.” In response to his statement, the audience broke into unrestrained applause. When the next African American man spoke, he pleaded for a moment “to pause and recognize the loss of thousands of people. The nation paused on 9-11, but not now. No one cares about our losses. I am a homeowner who is homeless. I am a taxpayer and a voter. I placed my trust in the elected officials to do what is right, but instead we got nothing. We are not refugees, we are Americans.” Subsequently, a black woman, who had stood while holding her sleeping toddler in her arms during the first seven speakers, continued the theme of government accountability to its citizens: “I was one of the people left behind. I was stuck on a roof in New Orleans East. I am a taxpayer and a registered voter. I am happy, but I am not rich. I have been shifted to five hotels all around the country. I am tired. I have never asked Louisiana for anything. I just want a place to call my own. I didn’t need help before this. I was doing for myself and for my children. Mr. Mayor, all I want is a home for my children for Christmas.” After this woman, a black man who lost his home in the Ninth Ward and was displaced first to Denver and then to Dallas confronted the mayor, saying, “What is really going on? You are asking us to come back to work. I served this city for thirtyfive years, and we are watching foreigners get paid to rebuild it while we are sitting on the curb. There is something going on, Mr. Mayor. I understand about the dollar bill situation, but I want to come back and function for my people, for New Orleans. It is wrong for us to be turned down. I was willing to stay an extra year to help my city. This is my home; these are my roots. We are not in Texas. We are here.” It is not surprising that individuals who suffered catastrophic losses would articulate impassioned emotional pleas. It is more provocative when so many of these requests are framed with an anxiety about citizenship. Not only did the people of New Orleans whom I spoke with express sadness and grief about their loss, they also provided explanations for that loss that were rooted in racialized understandings of themselves as disposable members of the American populace. They asserted their positions as homeowners, taxpayers, citizens, and government workers as they constructed an argument about their city and country’s betrayal of them. These interviews proved to be a rich source for understanding the depth of the emotional trauma and the importance of political explanations for survivors. However, what remains remarkable about the aftermath of Katrina is that black Americans who were not directly impacted by the disaster also experienced significant elevations of negative emotions.

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Survey data make clear that Americans not only felt bad as they witnessed Katrina; the vicarious experience of the disaster had immediate and dramatic political consequences. The Pew study reported that 67 percent of Americans believed that President Bush could have done more in his handling of the relief effort, and nearly 60 percent rated the response of the federal government as only fair or poor.6 The Katrina disaster also caused many Americans to reconsider the nation’s security, with 42 percent reporting that the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina made them feel less confident that the government can handle a major terror attack. In the aftermath of the hurricane, job approval ratings for President Bush plummeted,7 and one year later they still had not rebounded to their pre-Katrina levels. Many observers point to the Katrina disaster as both a national tragedy and a political turning point, linking an emotionally difficult experience with a politically relevant change in public opinion. The nation’s emotional reactions to the Katrina disaster are important because they demonstrate the link between how Americans think about social and political realities and how they feel about national events. To test the hypothesis that Americans’ affective responses to Katrina were primarily rooted in a particular understanding of America’s racial history, the analysis below estimates a model of emotional distress among black and white Americans in the weeks following Katrina as a function of personal, political, and racial variables. This estimation is performed using data from the Racial Attitudes and Katrina Disaster Study by the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. Researchers normally do not think of an individual’s mental or emotional state as resulting primarily from world political events. Decades of epidemiological work have convincingly demonstrated that we can make predictions about the likelihood that an individual will feel depressed, angry, or fragile based on a number of personal characteristics and proximate life circumstances. Even in the days and weeks following Katrina we should expect most emotional variability between individuals to be directly related to durable and personal patterns that have been explicated in previous research. We should expect that poorer and less-educated Americans should generally feel more psychological distress than their more affluent counterparts. We should expect women to express more sadness than men, and for the very young and very old to express more sadness than those who are middle-aged. In light of these expectations, the equations estimated below control for education, income, sex, and age.8 Acknowledging that a significant proportion of the variation in individual emotional responses can be accounted for by these variables, the goal of this analysis is to determine whether there is an independent relationship between negative emotions and political variables after accounting for the demographic variables. To explore this question, the model below uses three categories of variables. The partisan variables used in the equation include partisan self-identification9 and agreement with the statement “President George W. Bush represents the concerns of people like you.” The second set of questions taps respondents’ attitudes toward America. Respondents were asked to rank their level of agreement with the statement “I am proud to be an American” and with the statement, “America is the land of opportunity. If a person works hard in America he or she can accomplish almost anything.” The survey respondents were also asked to assess which statement is

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truer: “America’s economic system is fair to everyone” or “America’s economic system is unfair to poor people.” The model tests the hypothesis that Americans’ emotional responses to Hurricane Katrina were intimately linked to their beliefs about race and America’s racial history. Several measures of racial attitudes are used to capture this idea. Blacks were asked if they believed that what happens to black people will affect their lives and whites were asked if they believe what happens to whites will affect their lives. These raciallylinked fate attitudes are included in the model below. Respondents also indicated if they believed that blacks in America have achieved racial equality, will soon achieve racial equality, will not achieve equality in their lifetimes, or will never achieve racial equality. Responses to this question serve as a measure of racial pessimism. Finally, respondents were asked a series of questions about their support for federal reparations for African Americans as compensation for a number of historic injustices. Blacks and whites were asked, (1) “Do you think the federal government should or should not pay money to African Americans whose ancestors were slaves as compensation for that slavery?” (2) “Do you think the federal government should or should not pay money to African Americans as compensation for the system of anti-black violence and legal segregation known as ‘Jim Crow’?” (3) “Do you think that reparations should or should not be paid to survivors and their descendants of large, violent, twentieth-century anti-black riots such as those that occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Rosewood, Florida?” Responses to these three items are combined in a single scale indicating overall support for reparations to black Americans. The dependent variable is a scale derived from a factor of eight emotional response variables that asked respondents, “In the past five weeks since the Hurricane Katrina disaster how often have you felt: so sad that nothing could cheer you up; nervous; restless or fidgety; hopeless; that everything was an effort; worthless; that difficulties were piling up so high you could not overcome them; and that you are unable to control the important things in your life.” The scale is computed as a factor and is constrained to a unit scale where 1 represents the highest presentation of symptoms on all indicators and 0 represents having none of these negative emotions. Table 11.2 presents the estimated coefficients and standard errors from an ordinary least squares regression modeling the emotional distress scale from the University of Chicago Katrina Disaster Study as a function of these partisan variables, demographic variables, and national and racial attitudes. The model is estimated separately for white and black respondents to account for possible differences in the emotional processes operating for each group. As expected, the model accounts for relatively little of the variation in emotional distress among blacks or whites. As predicted, most people feel bad or good based on personal and proximate causes. There is a substantial and statistically significant effect that gender and age bear on both whites and blacks. Men and middle-aged people experienced fewer symptoms of emotional distress in the weeks following Katrina. Somewhat surprisingly, education is not a statistically significant covariant for either group. Income is significant only for whites. Poorer whites are far more emotionally distressed in the weeks following Katrina than are their wealthier counterparts. For African Americans however, income makes no difference. Poorer and richer blacks were equally likely to feel sad and overwhelmed.

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Table 11.2 Model of emotional distress among black and white Americans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina Whites n=602 r2 = 0.16 Coefficient

SE

Blacks n=345 r2 = 0.10 Coefficient

SE

Partisan Variables Bush represents people like me Democrat Republican

-0.05 -0.03 -0.03

0.04 0.02 0.02

-0.06 -0.01 -0.02

0.06 0.02 0.06

Attitudes toward United States Proud to be American America is unfair to the poor America is the land of opportunity

-0.06 -0.01 -0.15*

0.05 0.02 0.04

-0.05 -0.01 -0.10*

0.06 0.02 0.05

Racial Attitudes Racial linked fate Blacks will not achieve equality Reparations Support (3 item scale)

-0.04* -0.01 -0.04*

0.01 0.01 0.02

-0.05* -0.03 -0.03*

0.02 0.02 0.01

Demographic Variables Education Income Female Age2 Constant

-0.03 -0.14* -0.04* -0.002* -0.62*

0.04 0.04 0.01 0.0004 0.05

-0.03 -0.07 -0.04* -0.001* -0.48*

0.06 0.05 0.02 0.0006 0.07

Source: Racial Attitudes and Katrina Disaster Study by the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture Coefficients estimated with ordinary least squares regression. The dependent variable is constrained to a unit scale. Coefficients can be read as the percent change in total emotional distress. For example, those whites who support all three forms of reparations are 4 percentage points more distressed in the weeks following Katrina than those whites who do not support any form of reparations, all else being equal. * indicate significance at p